Music Material and Music Idea

A persistent discussion that I used to have with Morton Feldman when I studied composition with him at Buffalo was about the relationship between the music sonic material of a piece and the musical idea for the organization of the work. Feldman always thought that it is the material what determines and conditions a composition, what makes it work for a specific time-span and not for other. His orientation was mainly orchestrational and harmonic, so the material choices would have to do with the right chord orchestration, the appropriate and careful choice of progressions, registers and timbres. My answer was that such choices of orchestration had a double foundation, empirical and conceptual, and that if we separate them we only obtain an incomplete picture of the composition. In fact, I insisted, it is the conceptual part in the choice of the material what gives a link between the microharmony of the chordal progressions and the general structure of the piece (as much in tonal as in atonal music). My arguments never convinced him and he kept composing in his wonderful Bergsonian way, but the discussion has helped me, through the years, to better understand my own expectations about the compositional action.

The tension between the sonic-perceptual and the structural-conceptual part of a composition is better understood in a general epistemological frame. Put in Kantian terms (First Critique. A51): our conceptions and musical ideas without music material are empty, and our sonic constructions without a conceptual frame are blind.

What kind of morphisms can we establish between ideas and sonic materials? The most common are those given by our traditions: instrumental sounds and contrapuntal and harmonic structures to organize them according to different theoretical principles, going from the empirical to the conceptual. But also, there have been morphisms which gave a sonic material to a particular conceptual structure, going from the conceptual to the empirical. These morphisms make our concepts audible, they give an aural intuition to something which is not perceptible through the senses. Examples of these morphisms are found in Dufay’s Nuper Rosarum Flores, which reproduces the form of the Cathedral of Florence in the structure of the piece, or the adaptation that Lejaren Hiller made for computer of a piece of Johannes Kepler based on the proportions of the planets of the solar system, or, say, a piece that would use the pattern of reproduction of cells and bacteria and assign them to two durational patterns for a percussion duet. In this second category of pieces, we obtain new perceptual objects which render abstract ideas into intuitions expanding the world of sonic materials beyond our more spontaneous ways of creating them. Another question is the aesthetical interest of those new objects.