This Is the Piece

THIS IS THE PIECE CHRISTIAN ASPLUND 362 Perspectives of New Music GRAMMARS S A NEW GRAD STUDENT IN THE EARLY 1990S I remember feeling very much at home in John Rahn’s seminars, which were beautifully unpredictable, highly speculative affairs, with an anything goes vibe, ranging in short succession through multiple disciplines and modes of thought. They gave me novel insights that have stayed with me and affected my work ever since: regarding sequence/simultaneity, structuring of time, relations between different objects, and the role and nature of precomposition, or lack thereof. I have a recollection of him saying something like, anything can be mapped to anything given the right function. I learned to view precomposition as its own form of research, and that the relationship between conception and realization could be unique for every work created. This Is the Piece came out of this heady atmosphere. In 1994 I registered for John’s seminar on Artificial Musical Intelligence (AMI). At the time my only programming experience was in John’s computer music class using his LISP Kernel. One of the topics we covered was Chomsky’s phrase structure grammars as outlined in his Syntactic Structures.1 This subject captured my imagination as a fruitful and novel approach to sequencing musical events. At the same time, I was taking a seminar on the music of Anthony Braxton and other avantgarde jazz musicians. Braxton’s musical system in particular seemed to resonate with my project. He chunked music in entirely unique ways, ways that seemed to open onto new ordering paradigms like the one I envisioned using Chomskyan grammar. LANGUAGE MUSIC When Braxton played his first improvised solo saxophone concert in the late 1960s, he realized after ten minutes that he had run out of material. It must have been a disaster because he didn’t have collaborating musicians to cover for him and to feed him ideas. He decided he needed something both to structure his improvisations and to provide material for them. The result was his taxonomy of Language Types (LT) (see Appendix A)2 and Sound Classifications (SC) (see Appendix B)3. These became the foundation for his “Language Music” which in turn enabled him to record the first solo saxophone album,4 and to perform many solo concerts and several other solo albums since then. He has used Language Music in ensemble contexts as well.5 A This Is the Piece 363 There are only spotty sources of information about Braxton’s musical systems. They all seem to have a hybrid character of both a learned/literate invention and an oral/gnostic tradition. My information derives mainly from descriptions by his students, particularly saxophonist-composer Maxim Mahoney-Flake, who studied with Braxton, and with whom I collaborated for several years shortly after. Consequently, I am unable to cite some of this information. I have come to believe that Braxton left many details of his music open/ mysterious, doubtlessly for didactic/aesthetic/spiritual reasons he chose not to explicate. In these cases, I have felt empowered to fill in the blanks using deduction and creativity. I have found Language Music to be a powerful alternative to more traditional means of organizing improvisation. Improvisation in jazz until around 1960 had been structured around harmonic sequences (chord changes). With the advent of “freedom,” jazz improvisation in the 1960s was often structured (when it was structured ) around scales or motives. It seems that Braxton was searching for another structural principle more suited both to solo performance and to his own compositional preferences. LTs deal largely with melodic contour and texture, while SCs seem to focus mainly, though not exclusively, on timbre and instrumental technique. Thus, melodic shape, texture, and timbre become the fixed or composed elements rather than harmony, mode, or motive. Indeed, LTs and SCs are usually neutral as to harmonic, scalar, and motivic implications. These two classes of objects seemed interesting and powerful alternatives to the note as notational morpheme. A highly developed notational practice using such symbols would allow a multitude of complex, unsegmented melodic events to be expressed: phrases that could never be represented by note-based notation. Further, I was interested in manipulating these symbols with...