Composing Chaos

Composing and chaos seem to be contradicting terms. They seem to represent opposing directions of thought or action. They aren’t, though, if composing implies creating repeatable surprise. Soundwise or structurewise.

In pop music recombining familiar elements is elementary for success. More precise: the right mix of surprise and familiarity makes the hit, just as in love. Coming up with a new way of delivering familiar elements can be sufficient; an inspiring personality, a rare vocal talent, a unique way of performing, an unseen mix of style and authenticity.

In so-called serious music recombining familiar elements occurs, but it happens self-consciously, because contemporary composers of orchestral music who insist on creating something unheard do have to invent musical language from the scratch. There might be some existing esthetic frames, but there is no musical language of serious concert music that could supply an existing set of rules or principles to which one could refer or which could be extended, as far as I know, and there are two reasons for that.

The once dominant language of concert music, European classical music, has already in 1918 been vastly extended to a point where it appeared to be impossible to go any further, with Arnold Schoenberg on one side, finally trying to replace the old system with a new system, the method of composing with twelve different halve-tones; and Igor Stravinsky as his counterpart, still trying to continue by extending it mostly on the rhythmic level, to put it very short. The second reason is of course the collapse of civilisation in European countries, especially in Germany, where from 1923 to 1933 a diverse group of far right antidemocratic and antisemitic politicians took every chance to destroy the democratic consense and discovered Hitler as their insane “führer”. Some of them happened to love Wagner and Beethoven. Also military parades stressing the 4/4 meter became omnipresent between 1933 and 1945 until their „führer“ had helped them destroy as much culture and spirit and human lives as they could and finally committed suicide himself.

The Holocaust changes the framing of art. The responsible mass of far-right activists in Germany suddenly didn’t follow the führer any more: instead of committing suicide, too, they took important positions in German society after 1945. The twelve long years of fascist politics left behind a lot of lies, but mostly ashes: of bodies, of culture, and ashes of civilisation. Among it were the ashes of European music. We lost the heartbeat for classical art music. In the long run, the loss also opened a door for us being born belated. We got interested in shaping chaos instead.

Composing chaos might not be altogether new. At this point we have to admit that chaos has several different meanings. It can point to the beginning of all existence (or its end). It can mean a quality of order: order that can’t be heard or seen or grasped, because it arranges or moves its elements in a very complex way. It can also mean the opposite of order, deliberately renouncing any further definition: the undefinable realm. So let’s first look at the opposite of composing chaos. Composing order can mean two different things: composing a predictable piece or composing a piece of latent order that seems chaotic but isn’t: It’s mathematically determined, but too complex for the listener to grasp its order. In both versions composing order follows a predictable structure or a principle that gives every element it’s determined position. That doesn’t say anything about how easily and quickly predictable the structure is. Also the accessibility of any music except comercial one varies from listener to listener depending on how familiar the specific type of music is for the respective ears.

Let’s assume a situation where somebody knows Western music well and has also been exposed to different traditions around the world from time to time. The person is listening to that piece of music for the first time. If everything is predictable after the first eight bars, we’re talking about composed order in the most extreme sense. Predictability then is the topic of the composition. Some pieces play with extreme predictability, often then adding a process of tiny shifts that create complexity out of simplicity. If a lot is predictable after twenty seconds, e.g. the general layout and style, but not every detail, then we’re probably talking about tonal, metrical music for comercial use, pop, classical music etc. If most of what happens was unpredictable and remains unpredictable even after fifteen minutes, we’re talking about an experimental piece of serious music. Some experts in the audience might have been able to roughly predict the piece, in which case we’re talking about composed order for experts. In contemporary music there is also a certain predictability of unpredictability. In other words: avoiding predictability often leads to the same sound. Even free jazz sometimes results in a certain sound pattern. We can predict, after having heard a couple of free jazz concerts, that in the next minute the saxophone will react to the drum’s energy with some multiphonics. But in a good free jazz or improvised music concert the listeners are being constantly surprised. This can only happen if nourished by chaos.

Predictability is a convention that compositions play with. If a composer publishes a piece where the solo piano player very, very slowly plays an arpeggio of a C-major chord, thar piete is reflecting on the convention of predictability. When we’re listening to any piece, we’re part of a game that is playing with predictability. If the piece shows a consciousness of that game by making everything seem to be extremely predictable, we’re probably feeling a certain suspension, because it’s clear that something will happen to break with the convention. The contract between audience and composer changes from concert hall to concert hall, depending on the program and the audience. It can be: nothing unpredictable will happen, but we all know how much we love the music (because the pieces of the program are well knwon to everybody in the audience and that’s why everybody came). It can be: something unpredictable will happen that gives us a thrill even if we wouldn’t like to hear it again (the premier of a new piece). Steve Reich’s „C-Major“ was a new piece, but broke with the convention that something will happen. Of course it only works as an exception.

As far as composing order is concerned, it helps to differentiate between obvious order and latent order, as already mentioned. Classic-romantic music has an obvious order for our ears, serial music and many styles that followed it until today have a latent order, or an ontonlogical order, but not a phenomenological one: every note has it’s reasonable position, it derives from a calculation or an underlying mathematical, geometrical or other structure, but when listening to it in a concert we can’t tell whether one of the musicians has made a mistake. Famously John Cage was asked by Pierre Boulez after a concert in Darmstadt, which kind of underlying structure he had been using for his intricate, complex composition. His answer was: „Chance. I rolled the dice for every decision.“ That could hint to the fact that composed latent order and composed chaos don’t have a clear border.

Can something repeatable be still called chaotic? Can we compose chaos, given that a composition must have an identity? We can’t, if the term chaos or chaotic is used as a technical term to describe unpredictable processes. But yes, we can compose chaos, if the term is used to describe a composition with a substantial amount of undetermined elements that appear in a shaped framing. Composing chaos can mean: probability replaces order.
Our term of composed chaos refers to a repeatable musical arrangement either in which single events can’t be predicted or calculated, or that is shaped very roughly, but the details are approached by probability, so that the shape is blurry and the details follow the rules of probability, untouched by traditional musical considerations, far away from „harmony“, „rhythm“ or „melody“ in their narrow sense, a method by which chaotic processes can be expressed by sound in a controlled way and which was first presented by Iannis Xenakis.

Also Mozart’s ideas of course went beyond the rules, even though his music’s gesture by now can be quite easily imitated. Mozart’s genious is more about freedom than about chaos. In some Asian or African contexts the door to chaos opens yet in a different sense. The famous example of Candomblé cult illustrates only one of many musical strategies: With the help of complex grooves and repetitous chants the mind calms down its categories until they are silent for half an hour.

In this article I’d like to rely on the relatively young notion of composing chaos that opened up around 1945, after not only the traditional musical language had been questioned, but any concept of order and belief that had held together society so far had to be reconsidered. In the last seventy-eight years a couple of technical and conceputal extensions have been added.

If chaos is the right word for the unpredictability of the details of a morning concert of a swarm of birds, then Messiaen might have been the first to follow the esthetics of chaos. I believe that this was one of the reasons why Messiaen and not Schoenberg turns out to have been laying the long-term foundations for a new understanding of art music. Three of his students became leading figures in the 20th century. Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen had their encounters with chaos. Iannis Xenakis will be dealt with thoroughly a bit further down.

With all these cracks and heritages after 1945 there seem to have been different ways left of dealing with traditions as a composer:

1. questioning the subjective perspective by integrating chance into composition
2. trying to determine every aspect of composition by underlaying a kind of DNA, a row of proportions for example, to every musical parameter, like a series of twelve different half-tones, as was typical for serialism.
3. minimalist approach: developping change out of the smallest possible amount of variables, repeating few elements and adding slight changes in order to observe how order dissolves itself and re-establishes or how very familiar musical elements loose their familiarity or change their expression when repeated extremely often.
4. trying to compose chaos itself, making chaos perceivable in a controlled way, that is to organize masses of sound in a way that is controlled without losing it’s qualities as chaos or without getting less complex than chaos. This option follows the idea that chaos and order aren’t necessarily opposed to each other, if our concept of order is adjusted to the ways by which chaos can be organized.
5. creating the frame for improvisation and open forms. Free jazz can be described as a way of collectively balancing chaos and order and then moving a bit further into chaos, tumbling and rocking from one side to the other, stretching into chaos but still staying together, still communicating and controlling what you do – or losing control in a controlled frame. In improvisational forms it’s possible to produce formed chaos or chaotic forms instantanously. Some free jazz groups have done exactly that, without first turning chaos into order in order to turn it into chaos again. Of course it needs at least ten years of preparation, the instrument and the art of improvisation have to be thoroughly controlled in order to skip all form and take it from the moment of getting together. Rather than composing chaos, this would be playing with chaos.

Composing chaos means to set a frame for chaos to happen or to be expressed by musical means. Most examples of composing chaos are turning chaos into order and back into chaos. Our main focus will be on the fourth option.

Let’s take a glance on the first step of composing chaos: taking chaos as a source for the musical material and breaking it into pieces.
What turns chaos into discrete pieces are processes that make something recognizable, by recognizing, isolating and naming something, so that it can be referred to, recognized or repeated. Re (recognize, repeat, refer, return) is the prefix of order. Ordering mechanisms or principles can be scientific, cognitive, artistic or philosophical. One of them is our brain’s ability to recognize patterns or to learn in general. Repeating a framed piece of musical chaos would automaically turn it into order: in our brain. Isolating a chaotic acoustical process by repeating it is the crucial step.

Once we have come here, the question is how we put the isolated elements back into chaos. We want to especially look at the ways to shape chaos, to not overcome it but to use it for organizing music, and thus re-creating chaos. It seems paradoxical to compose chaos without losing chaos. Organizing is connected to order, but composing is not the same as organizing, if you look at it closely. Composing includes the possibility to put elements into a formed chaos. That’s what makes composing interesting. To put musical elements into an esthetically perceivable form of chaos, a form that will be repeatable – as long as the basic conditions of a concert are given.

I would like to extend these abstract considerations with a little experiment:

Take five variables, let’s say five keys on a keyboard, and roll the dice or put it into a chance generator that produces unpredictable rows with the help of algorithms. Here is some letter chaos generated from five elements (a, c, h, o and s):

o a s o h c s h h s a h a c h c h a h a

The result is grey and bureaucratic. By adding a single rule, though, just like adding gravity to the initial chaos of the universe, shape and radiation appear. The rule is: do not repeat any letter until all five letters have been used. The dice are being rolled all the same:

h a o s c h a s o c s a o h c o s h a c

This line of letters seems to have more formal tension. The pattern can be made more visible to enhance any performance of it:

h a o s c / h a s o c / s a o h c / o s h a c

It’s nonsense from a semantic or semiotic perspective. Nothing is pointing to anything, no conventions are being used. But formally we see word-like groups of five letters, we’re obviously not dealing with chaos but with four permutations of five elements. If we repeat the four bars four times, the result is order:

h a o s c / h a s o c / s a o h c / o s h a c
h a o s c / h a s o c / s a o h c / o s h a c
h a o s c / h a s o c / s a o h c / o s h a c
h a o s c / h a s o c / s a o h c / o s h a c

It’s an utterly simple piece of music, so simple that I wouldn’t want to have to listen to it. One could theoretically call it shaped chaos. Phenomenologically it would be wrong. Even if we reverse or vary the four-bar material, it will not sound very chaotic. Five elements anyway are not a lot of variables for creating chaos. But after all they allow for 120 permutations, so let’s take some more of them, again applying the same rule to not repeat one element before all elements have been used:

h a o s c s c h a o s c h o a s h o a c h o a c s o h a c s o h a s c o s a c h s o a c h s c o a h s h c o a a s h c o a s h o c s h o c a s o c h a h c o a s c h a s o o c h a s c h o a s c h a o s

The worm is shaped by the one rule and by my subjective selection (I chose 20 permutations out of 120). Considering that we’re dealing with five elements only, it has become quite chaotic now, but at the same time the rule seems to have become more visible. Again the formal potential shows if notated for easier performance:

haosc / schao / schoa / shoac /
hoacs / ohacs / ohasc / osach /
soach / scoah / shcoa / ashco /
ashoc / shoca / socha / hcoas /
chaso / ochas / choas / chaos

It looks like some material for a composition. Compared to language it lacks grammar, vocabulary, and semantics. It’s framed and shaped nonsense. It might be called Dadaism, if we want to use a term from art history. Yet, it doesn’t lack semantics altogether, because it ends with a semantic convention, pointing at the general topic of the composition.

For my composition “Chaos” go here

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More on Xenakis’ approach to composing chaos (German version see here):

Probably By Chance: Xenakis and Cage

Olivier Messiaen wanted to musically depict the impenetrable harmony of a bird concert at sunrise. He sat for hours in the field with pencil and paper to collect material and developed highly complex compositional techniques for the arrangement of the material, which were presented to the public in the piece “Modes des valeurs et d’intensités”. New music is still influenced by this piece today. His short-term student Iannis Xenakis turned out to be his most important. He went one step further at the decisive point, with the sound model of chaotic complexity; be it that of birds, cicadas, people or the universe. He did not want to depict the impenetrable and yet harmonious, strikingly beautiful or even shocking, and yet not lawless complexity of a bird concerto, but to use the mathematical laws behind it, so that he could not only depict bird concertos, but chaos itself, which is not the same as anarchy.

The difference between chaos and order is a subjective one. Chaos also has its laws. They can be described by the theory of probability. Xenakis objectified chaos with the help of music. He used the laws of chaos, stochastics, to construct his music. He was determined not to write subjective music. Objective music becomes interesting to the extent that it succeeds in representing the objectivity of chaos. The objectivity of order, which people perceive as order anyway, is boring, it dynamically opens doors that are already open. The objectivity of order perceived as chaos can only be represented by music, and this is precisely what the Greek architect and activist used music for. He remains one of the two geniuses of serious music in the 20th century.

Cage and Xenakis have often been contrasted because both brought chance into play against the strange attempts at control by the serialists. Cage has a more esoteric approach, Xenakis an exoteric one. Cage’s attitude, which tries to accept things as they are, and to train the mind again and again to regard the given as the right thing and to adapt one’s own interpretation of the given so that inner peace is not endangered, is contrasted with an attitude that does not become resigned from the experience of the collapse of civilisation, but seeks a new space of freedom with the help of objective methods of shaping chaos. Cage says that everything is contingent anyway, so don’t resist it, but let things have their say as they appear without your will. Xenakis distinguishes between chaos and contingency. As long as we hold on to our claim to civilisation, life makes sense. But holding on to it is only an option if you take chance and chaos into account. For Cage, chance is untouchable, for Xenakis it is only human when it is designed. Cage is a photographer of chance, Xenakis a painter of chance, even of chaos. Cage is humble, Xenakis is humanistic.

Xenakis expresses a human tragedy, Cage a world view. Cage does not want to approach chaos phenomenologically. The composed events should be as independent as possible. This is where he meets Stockhausen’s „Kontrapunkte“.

What Xenakis and Cage have in common is the decision to no longer compose morally. The one achieves it by no longer prescribing any relationships between the sounds. They should arise by chance. The other achieves it by objectifying chaos and declaring it a method.