“Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts”

“Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts”

Eno opens with a provocative statement: “A musical score is a statement about organization, it is a set of devices for organizing behaviour towards producing sounds.” While composers of the past two centuries have concentrated on the specific instructions given to the performers, the mode of social organization and interaction implied by the use of a score has remained essentially static. “A traditional orchestra is a ranked pyramidical hierarchy of the same kind as the armies that existed contemporary to it.” The pyramid of power has the composer and his absolutely binding “intentions and aspirations” at its pinnacle, in descending positions of power are the conductor, leader of the orchestra, soloists if called for, section principals, section subprincipals, and finally rank and file members at the bottom. This ranking system has three characteristics that are in Eno’s view problematic or symptomatic. First, it “reflects varying degrees of responsibility.” Second, “like perspective in painting, it creates ‘focus’ and ‘point of view.’“ In the foreground is the intent of the composer, the conductor’s interpretation, and the performance of the soloist(s), the playing of the rank and file members is liable to be perceived as a kind of background phenomenon. Third, the orchestra’s ranking system

predicates the use of trained musicians. A trained musician is, at the minimum, one who will produce a predictable sound given a specific instruction. His training teaches him to be capable of operating precisely like all the other members of his rank. It trains him, in fact, to subdue some of his own natural variety and thus to increase his reliability (predictability).¹⁷⁶

Eno never comes right out and says that he believes this variety-reducing effect of the institutions of classical music to be undesirable or entirely negative. Rather, he borrows from cybernetics, holding up as an ideal for musical composition and performance the concept of an organism or system whose behavior is determined not through predictable subservience to a centralized control structure, but through “a responsive network of subsystems capable of autonomous behaviour.”¹⁷⁷ Musical scores composed with this ideal in mind would not be conceived as a means of controlling the behavior of the performers to the sole end of carrying out the composer’s intent. Rather, musical scores would be heuristic, attempting to take advantage of, rather than to suppress, the natural variety occasioned by the performers and performance situation. Eno quotes cybernetician Stafford Beer’s definition of a “heuristic” with approval: “a set of instructions for searching out an unknown goal by exploration, which continuously or repeatedly evaluates progress according to some known criterion.”¹⁷⁸ Eno cites Beer’s example of a non-musical heuristic: “If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain which is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get them there.”¹⁷⁹

Much of Eno’s essay consists of a discussion of examples of contemporary experimental music whose scores can be considered heuristic. Cornelius Cardew’s “Paragraph 7” (from The Great Learning) is the piece treated at greatest length.¹⁸⁰ This is a vocal score in which considerable freedom is given to the performers in terms of which pitches to sing and how long to hold them. The overall effect is one of meditative calm and tranquility – a slowly shifting, complex yet not too dissonant chord with a sense of one central drone pitch. What fascinates Eno about “Paragraph 7” is how the score stipulates not a specific result, but a range of possible results, how it accomodates the instincts and respects the choices of performers of all levels of musical training, and how elements not inherent in the score become primary features of the sound (beat frequencies appear between different sustained sung notes, and the strongest pitch, which naturally evolves out of the minimal instructions, becomes the resonating frequency of the room itself, which will vary from performance to performance – the singers pick it up intuitively and gravitate towards it). Eno sums up his discussion of “Paragraph 7”:

Something quite different from classical compositional technique is taking place: the composer, instead of ignoring or subduing the variety generated in performance, has constructed the piece so that this variety is really the substance of the music.

Perhaps the most concise description of this kind of composition, which characterizes much experimental music, is offered in a statement made by the cybernetician Stafford Beer. He says: “Instead of trying to specify it in full detail, you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go.” In the case of the Cardew piece, the “dynamics of the system” is its interaction with the environmental, physiological and cultural climate surrounding its performance.¹⁸¹

Another experimental piece Eno finds laudable for similar reasons is Michael Nyman’s 1-100, which was recorded on Eno’s own Obscure label.¹⁸² “In this piece, four pianists each play the same sequence of 100 [mostly relatively consonant] chords descending slowly down the keyboard. A player is instructed to move on to his next chord only when he can no longer hear his last.”¹⁸³ As in the Cardew piece, these instructions produce not a specific result but a range of possible results, and the performers must be actively involved in creative listening throughout, also, the technical level of ability of the pianists need not be high, although here they must be able to cope with the basics of musical notation and a considerable number of ledger lines.

Cardew’s “Paragraph 7,” Nyman’s 1-100, and Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (another piece Eno treats briefly) share a quality that was beginning to surface in Eno’s own music around the time this essay was published: they give the sense of being music that “is a section from a hypothetical continuum [that is] not especially directional – it does not exhibit strong “progress” from one point (position, theme, statement, argument) to a resolution.”¹⁸⁴ One cannot imagine a movement from a Beethoven symphony ending halfway through with a fadeout ending, but one can imagine any number of modern experimental pieces ending this way, since they give no sense of driving inexorably into the future along a developmental line.

Eno does not wish to go too far in his classification and judgement of types of composition and performance practices. Rather he proposes that every type of music can be placed somewhere along a “scale of orientations” based on the extent to which it tends to subdue or encourage variety in performance. A free-jazz improvisation would be placed towards one end of the scale, a classical symphony towards the other. However,

virtually any example will show that aspects of each orientation exist in any piece. What I am arguing for is a view of musical development as a process of generating new hybrids ... A scale of this kind does not tell us much about the music that we place on it, but its function is to remind us to think in terms of hybrids.¹⁸⁵

“Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts” is primarily an essay about process, Eno does not broach questions of aesthetics as such. Although he declares that the most important characteristic of Cardew’s “Paragraph 7” is its calm, meditative quality, and directs one small barb at the modern music establishment (Nyman’s 1-100 “is extremely beautiful to listen to – a factor which seems to carry little critical weight at present”),¹⁸⁶ the focus of the essay is on the ways music is made. Eno does not discuss the large quantities of aleatory (partially improvised) and indeterminate (chance) music composed in the 1950s and 1960s by Pierre Boulez, Cage, Lukas Foss, and others, much of whose non-tonal sounding surface clashes so radically with his own aesthetic preferences and commitments. To Eno, the product is ultimately at least as important as the process.

It is probably fair to say that, under the sway of the image of the authority of the musical score – and for someone who does not read music, that image must seem all the more oppressive – Eno underestimates the importance of “process” in the rehearsal and performance of classical pieces. Orchestral players may be forced to subdue some of their natural variety, but the whole regimen of musical training is nothing if not a process and a discipline, such discipline may appear less interesting to an outsider than spontaneous playing, but certainly a worthwhile product is rarely achieved by totally automatic music-making in any situation.

Furthermore, the classical tradition is somewhat more open to expressive variety than Eno, with his military image of the orchestra, seems to allow. The orchestra may or may not be “the paradigm of classical organization,” as Eno puts it, but in any case he chooses to ignore the role of improvisation in art music – which, though admittedly in almost total eclipse for over a century and a half, has begun to be resuscitated by musicians concerned with authentic historical performance practices. Improvising over a ground bass, realizing a Baroque figured bass or a French unmeasured prelude (types of music composed in notational “shorthand,” leaving many rhythmic and textural choices up to the player), extemporizing a set of variations on a theme, elaborating a melody through creative selection from an array of embellishments – certainly in each of these cases one can speak of a process that aims at a range of possible results rather than at a single, entirely predictable result.

But in the cybernetic concept of the adapting, intelligent, complex, heuristically-directed organism finding its way amongst a pleroma of environmental and evolutionary alternatives, Eno has found a striking analogy for the workings of a kind of music-making process that today is to a great extent ruled out by traditional institutions. It was a process in which he had participated through his performances of experimental pieces, and in a different way, it was a process that he was trying to encourage, as we shall see, in the making of his own progressive rock and ambient music albums.