Complexity, new music, and microtonality

From: mclaren
To: New practical microtonality group
Subject: complexity, new music, and microtonality

"Although our music is complex to the point that few
people can listen to it, we certainly do not offer the
world's most complex music, merely the world's most
unlistenable music. To compare our music to that of
north India by asking which is the more complex is
simply ludicrous." -- Miller Puckette

The first and most obvious point to bear in mind about
Puckette's claim is the fact that Puckette probably means
something counterintuitive by the word "complexity."
If "complexity" means "audibly complicated sounding,"
then Puckette's claim is usually demonstrably
false. Much so-called "new" music is not complex. It
does not sound complex at all -- on the contrary, it sounds
trite and monotonous and wholly trivial.
Let us take a specific example:
B. Ferneyhough's piano composition "Lemma-Icon-Epigram"
is alleged by many in academia to embody the so-called
"New Complexity." This is the epitome of the kind of
compopsition Puckette is probably talking about.
However, the ordinary listener (i.e., a listener not
soaked in the ideology of the modernist musical Kloran)
does not hear anything complex when s/he listens to
"Lemma-Icon-Epigram."
What the ordinary non-ideologized listener hears is
an irregular herky-jerky clangor of rough intervals
intersperesed with unpredictably loud and soft pitches
which appear to follow no discernible melodic pattern,
and which come and go spasmodically in the manner
of cards falling out of a house of cards once the bottom-
most card has been yanked away.
The oridnary listener quickly realizes that this musical
composition has no functional harmonies and underlying
rhythmic pulse and no discernible overall melodic arc.
Ferneyhough's composition creates no sense of musical
drama in the ordinary listener, and generates no detectable
expectations about what might happen next, since the
irregular and spadmodic musical events (intervals, melodic
pitches, changes in dynamics, etc.) occur with any perceptible
audible organization.
According the ordinary listener realizes within perhaps
20-30 seconds that the music will continue going on like
this until, at some unpredictable point in the future, it ends
without warning.
This does not create a sense of "complexity" in the ordinary
listener -- at least, in none of the ordinary listeners for whom
I've played excerpts of "Lemma-Icon-Epigram." Instead,
the typical response from ordinary listeners is: "Is it all like
this?"
When I answer "Yes," the next question by ordinary listeners
proves revealing: "Well...then how long is this piece of music?"
(Or words to that effect.)
No matter what my answer, the ordinary listener eventually
makes a remark to the effect "This is really boring stuff. It's
going nowhere." (Again, words to that effect.)
Thus the alllegedly "complex" music of The New Complexity
(so-called) actually creates a profound sense of monotony in
ordinary (that is, non-ideologized) listeners. Ordinary listeners
remark on the stultifying sameness of music of The New Complexity.
After the first few seconds of spasmodic unpredictable pitches and
intervals, the overall sound of this allegedly "complex" music settles
down into a rut of unutterably wearisome unpredictability.
The net effect is the same as watching static on a TV screen.
There
is nothing complex about static on a TV screen. Each individual
pixel on the TV screen shifts with great intricacy...but when you
add up all the alleged intricacy, you get a dull-as-dishwater boring
sameness because the overall statistical ensemble effect never varies.
Now, this is what people who claim to write "complex" music do
not understand -- the human nverous system is a not a simple linear
transmission line, like a telephone or a telegraph. The human nervous
system is a sophisticated sieve which searches dynamically for
patterns,
and reduces at each hierarchical input stage the information coming
in to its simplest representation. We do not literally see or
actually hear
the world around us -- we see only greatly infromation-reduced
versions
of the world around us, because our nervous systems are kludges which
had to build on earlier and more primitive neurological structures and
consequently the human nervous system can ony deal with a limited
amount of information per unit time.
Exceeding that amount of information per unit time does not
produce
audibly more complex music. It prodcues audibly _less_ complex
music...
Because when the human nervous system encounters infromation it cannot
parsimoniously reduce, it simply throws it out.
Consequently the human nervous system throws out 99% of what the
ears take in when listening to a composition of the so-called "New
Complexity"
school. Since we do not hear the world around us, but only
parisomoniously
information-compressed versions of the world around, what we hear
when we
listen to music of the "New Complexity" school is a statistical
steady state
which sounds ergodically uniform and therefore trivial. With new or
no audible
patterns to latch onto, the human ear/brain system dumps the surface
events
(individual notes, momentary note-clusters, briefly iterated herky-
jerky
rhythms which appear to form a pattern but rapidly go nowhere) and
reports
that there is very little regularity in the audible input.
As humans we literally do not hear sound input which has no
discernible
regularity -- after a short time, our nervous system filters it out,
and we literally
stop hearing the input. Examples of this include the white noise of
the fan in
your computer (ah -- you hear it now, but you didn't up until a few
moments
ago, did you), the murmur of coversation at a party, traffic noises
oustide
an apartment, and so on.
The music of the so-called "New Complexity" belongs to this class
of
statistically steady-state ensembles. Because the human ear/brain
system is
so sophisictaed, it rapidly learns to recognize and disregard such
information-
free statistically steady-state auditory inputs. A constant spatter
of herky-jerky
pitches and intervals with no discernible overall pattern belongs to
the same
category of input, and is consequently regarded as the human nervous
system
as an input of minimal infomration which is not processed and thus
does not
even exist as far our higher-level musical perceptions are concerned.
Few people can listen to music of the "New Complexity" school
because it
is so trite and trivial, and so boring. As a statistical steady
state, the only musical
events of any note in such music are the extrema of the fluctuating
normal
distribution -- which is to say, the momentary louder or softer,
higher or lower,
shorter or longer, pitches and rhythms which represent the outermost
boundaries
of the variance around the statistical mean. Of course such
statistically steady-state
distributions can only be distinguished from one another by analysis
of variance,
the ehight of the mean, the rate at which the slope of the bell curve
around the
mean drops off, and so on. Thus, not only does one
allegedly "complex" modernist
musical composition sound unutterably wearisome and trite and trivial
within
its own length, but each allegedly "complex" modernist musical
composition which
strives for "complexity" sounds nearly indisguishable from each other
allegedlly
"complex" modernist musical composition -- differing only in such
minor details
as the variance around the mean pitch (the lowest notes and the
highest notes),
the general height of hte mean, and so on.
In ordinary musical terminology this means that one
allegedly "complex"
modernist composition can typicall be audibly distinguished from
another
such composition only insofar as one composition has a slightly louder
chaotic spatter of patternless pitches and intervals, or another
composition
has a spasmodic set of incoherent and disorganized broken-apart
rhythms
which start and stop in a more extremely herky-jerky manner than
another
similiar composition.
This is familair to us from everyday experience. We do not
usually make
a distinction between two TV screens displaying static simply because
we
turn up the brightness knob on one TV, so that the static gets
slightly
brighter, or if we turn up the volume knob on the other TV so that the
roar of white noise gets slightly louder To ordinary observers,
static on
a TV screen is a statistically stationary and therefore boring and
trivial
visual input, and it still looks as boring and as trivial regardless
of how much
we turn up or turn down the volume knob or hte brightness knob or the
contrast knob on the TV set. There's nothing there, and playing with
the
knobs makes no difference to our seeing anything there.
The various competing modernist ideologies (aleastoric theory as
developed by the coin-flipping kook, serial row schemes as developed
by the Viennese kook, pitch-class set theory as elaborated by the
Princeton kook) all represent nothing more than playing with the
different
knobs on a TV set. No matter how much anyone plays with the knobs,
the static remains static -- our nerouvs sytem will not be fooled into
suddenly finding the static on the TV screen wonderfully fascinating
and
marvellously emotionally gripping and imaginative simply because we
turn the volume or the brightness or the contrast knob to one
particular
settting on the TV set.
In the same way, using one particular mathematical or ideological
technique to produce sets of pitches with no discernible melody
and no perceptible rhythmic pulse and no fucntional harmony and no
audible organization will not suddenly fool the human ear/brain system
into finding the incoherent herky-jerky splatters of pitches
emotionally
gripping and imaginative and wonderfully fascinating. There is no
technique which will accmplish this task as long as the modernist
composer disregards the properties of the human nervous system.
The second and perhaps more important point to bear in mind
is that most of the audible complexity in music is in the listener,
not
in the music. Thus Puckette's statement about the relatively
complexity
of North Indian music proves ironic, for 99% of the complexity in
*either* Western *or* Indian music resides in the listener. The
complexity arises from the subtle web of cltural relatiionships which
invisibly guide the listener to a recognition of how the Indic or
Western
composer is doing things differently, and how the Indic or Western
composer is doing things the same, as other composers in the
same culture.
To attempt to abstract the alleged "complexity" of music from the
web of cultural relationships which sustain it is approximately the
same
kind of ingenious insight as scraping all the paint off the Mona Lisa
and
dumping it in a mass spectrometer in an effort to see the painting
better.
Such escapades do not end well.
How do we take note of the properties of the human nervous in
music?
By a feedback process of learning while doing -- this process
involves a social interaction with other members of the same
culture. It develops an intuition for what works musically as
compared to
what does not work musically. Misnamed "musical talent," this
process of hands-on learning by doing can occur only as long as
the human nervous system is not clogged up by inputs which
prevent the composer from actually *hearing* the music
s/he produces, and the music other composers produce.
One such input which prevents composers from hearing
things is called "ideology." It is the primary work product of
20th century composers, and future centuries will regard with
mixed laughter and disbelief the fact that so many smart people
could use so much intellectual wattage to generate such a
sophisticated way of making themselves stupid.
The simplest and most straightforward way of making your
stupid is to marinate yourself with an ideology which prevents
you from interacting with reality. Even the most badly mentally
defective imbecile cannot manage to make hi/rself as blindly
stupid as the ideologue -- precisely because the ideologue
twists all of hi/r brainpower into ignoring reality in service of
some self-delusion. Orindary people cannot act or think
this stupidly. It requires sustained effort, hard work, a
vast intellect, and enormous dedication. To reach the highest
and most Olympian levels of stpuidity, in short, you need a PhD.
What has this to do with microtonality?
By following Puckette's reasoning to its logical conclusion,
we arrive at the concept that the primary justification for
going outside the conventional Western tuning is to crank up
the complexity of the music even further. If 12 pitches allow
12 factorial possible interrelations, then 30 pitches allow 30
factorial possible itnerrelationships, and 70 pitches allow
70 facotrial, and so on.
The erstwhile modernist copmoser quickly realizes, however,
that going outside 12 is futile. Since, as mentioned, the audible
information in most music of the "New Complexity" vastly
exceeds the information processing capability of the human
nervous system already (just listen to Ferneyhough or the music
of the Parisian kook or the Pirinceton kook), increasing
the number of pitch relationships will make no audible difference.
A scrambled set of incoherent herky-jerky pitches and intervals
which spasmodically clang and screech in 12 equal will sound
no different than a scrambled set of icoherent herky-herky pitches
and itnervals spasmodically claning and screeching in 31 equal,
or 71 limit just intonation, or an Erv Wilson Combination Product
Set, or members 11183-37827 of the harmonic series.
Encountering this paradox, the modernist composer iincorrectly
concludes that microtonality is worthless because it makes no
audible difference to the music. Thus does microtonality receive
such short shrift from academia.
A carpenter who bangs twice as hard with his screwdrive in a vain
attempt to beat a nail into a board will not get anywhere. This does
not mean that the screwdriver is useless as a tool. But it does say
something about the carpenter.
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--mclaren