A composer friend recently wrote a piece of choral music using a procedure that resulted in a procedure for the choir to follow. This list of directions was the “score,” and the result of following the directions was the piece.
The gist of it was this: the first singer in a row sings one note, holding it as long as they can comfortably on one breath. As soon as the next singer hears the note, they sing another note of their own choosing, which must be different from the one before. The third singer hears the second note and chooses any note to sing that’s not the one that came before. So forth and so on until the end of the row. The first singer fades out first, then the next, then one by one, until one is left behind.
So the only rule is don’t sing the note that came before you. I decided to try this out on GarageBand. I hummed one note, made a new track, hummed another. Then I muted the first track, made a third, and added a new note. Muted the second, added a forth, added a new layer. I did this seven times, as if there were seven singers. The result is here:
Can you hear all seven entrances? Can you hear all seven exits?
The idea of the piece, I think, is to highlight the shape of one breath. My recreation of it is contrived, of course– in a real choral setting, I’d be able to hear everyone. In an audible system of notes, it’s hard not to sing notes that are in certain traditional relationship to each other, open fifths, comfy thirds, the V-7’s ingrained into our musical consciousnesses. The first few times I tried this, I compulsively sang notes with these common practice relationships. For each note to be in a “random” relationship to the one preceding it would take the I-ching-derived chance of Cage or, well, a computer. Perhaps what this experiment most clearly shows is what a computer-run algorithm could do that I couldn’t– that most choirs couldn’t. I am reminded of a line in Wardrip-Fruin recalling the genesis of computer science as “the investigation of what can and can’t be computed.” Musical tradition seems to run its own computations.
