From this moment on.

An interdisciplinary keynote address by Paul Beaudoin on composition in the arts for the Parnu

Contemporary Music Days, January 2015.

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Art, in whatever genre it appears, demands that each participant, from the creator and performer, to

those who witness it, engage in some meaningful way with its composition. In the most successful

works, each moment is reflective and predictive - that is, we know from where it comes and in what

direction it may be headed. As the work unfolds, it is as open as it is creatively inspired, allowing

possibilities for connection, incongruity, ambiguity or continuity. Over the next few days of this

conference, we will explore the ideas of composition in the arts. Our discussions, questions, reflections

and participation will embolden us to deepen our understanding of what composition can mean and

with that transformation, a hope that we will experience ever richer engagements.

Many of you may be composers or choreographers or painters. Some of you may be performers, and

certainly all of us are observers. We are all, at even the simplest of levels, concerned about

composition. Some may even say our very part of being alive is composition. We compose what we will

talk about, what we will eat, how we will move from one place to the next – just about everything a

human does can be thought of as composition – even if it is unconsciously considered. But this is not

the kind of composition that this conference, or this talk addresses. Let’s start somewhere else.

When I was first presented with the conference topic I had an immediate vision from that famous scene

in Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park with George.” George, of course, is Georges Seurat

the famous pointillist painter. Early in the first act we see George contemplating a work and he is quite

concerned and deeply engrossed in its creation. He sings a sound (well, it is a Broadway musical and

every situation get s a song!). He sings Color and Light which begin with these words – words which

clearly seem to spring from his deep preoccupation in making the painting.

Order.

Design.

Composition.

Tone.

Form.

Symmetry.

Balance.

I thought of this because they are often the very things that I think about when I am in the creative

moment. These are the things that concern me, and most likely every creative person. I’d like to

explore some of these ideas as they appear in different artistic mediums – film, dance, music, visual art

and well, let’s see what else I think of along the way.

MUSIC IS WAITING TO BE REVEALED EVERYWHERE

Perhaps we can start with this mega-hit, watched by over 5.2 million people, from Tucker.1

In December of 2010, the Kennedy family posted a one minute video of Tucker who they insist, plays the

piano and sings along at least 3 or 4 times every day. More than 5.2 million people have viewed this

“performance.” What is particularly striking is the frequency of words like singing playing, musical,

beautiful, magical, fresh and original used by the more than 2,700 viewers who felt compelled enough

to post comments for the video. Is man’s best friend exhibiting his skill for composition?

If Tucker isn’t composing, then perhaps we need to introduce a conductor – of sorts. In April 2014,

Celeste Bousier-Mougenot, an artist/composer, installed 14 tuned electric guitars inside the Barton

Gallery at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Each guitar was routed through to

either a reverb, overdrive or digital delay signal processing device. These 14 guitars occupies a space

that also housed 70 zebra finches. For four months the birds used the guitars as perches, landing strips,

hopping pads and general temperature controlled aviary. Each time a bird interacted with the

instrument, its action is amplified and heard inside enclosure.

The work, called “from Here to Ear”, is the 15th in a series of works that span as many years and

presented around the world. Bousier-Mougenot thinks of them as a kind of musical ecosystem. The

installation is wildly popular with the public and one question seems to come up more than any other:

“Do the birds know they are making music?”

It’s a good question and one that Bousier-Mougenot seems to side step quite nicely. It may come as a

surprise but, the birds for the Massachusetts installation were hired through a casting company called

“Animal Actors, Inc.” So, these are professional birds. The aviary is maintained impeccably and an on

staff veterinarian is available to address any health concerns the birds may have. Even the floor plan for

the work is quite rigorous.2 The artist has composed where each guitar will be positions, how it will be

tuned, and where each amplifier will be placed. Inverted cymbals act as food and water dispensers. The

human visitors are free to move about the space and the zebra finches, a rather social species, seem to

rather enjoy the interaction.

The artist thinks of the installation as “a device – a plan. It’s a piece that’s impossible for humans to

play.”3 Instead, the birds become fingers flying from guitar to guitar and when Bousier-Mougenot

leaves the space, the installation takes on a life and rhythm of its own. As he says, quiet poetically,

“music is waiting to be revealed everywhere.”

Bousier-Mougenot offers us two very useful jumping off points for our consideration of composition.

Quite unassumingly he suggests that art is really a way to invent your own tools and arrive at an

outcome. Secondly, that the work is really a device – a plan.

Perhaps then, composition is a kind of invitation, regardless of our technical ability to create, engage,

inspire, explore and understand the world in which we live. Whether the work is a Beethoven piano

sonata or a detailed manuscript of Michael Finnissy, each score is simply a set of plans, a suggestion, as

to how to recreate something that sprung from another’s imagination. Yet, invitations can bring us to

lots of unexpected, interesting and beautiful places.

TEXT AS COMPOSITION

The idea of text as composition reaches far back to the early twentieth century. The sound poetry

efforts of the Dada and Surrealists like Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonate and Hugo Ball’s Karawane from

Cabaret Voltaire seemed to die out at the dawn of the Second World War. Like a phoenix rising from

the ashes, it reappeared largely as a result of the influential experiments of John Cage, Marcel Duchamp

and Lithuanian born George Maciunas in the mid-1960s. The group, now calling themselves “Fluxus,”

grew to include creative people like Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, and Chris Burden. Burden,

an early performance artist, created “Shoot” and famously had himself shot in the arm by an assistant

from a distance of about 5 meters with a .22 rifle at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. Continuing

to bring the established art world to its knees, the Fluxus movement, under the strong and charismatic

leadership of Maciunas, seemingly left no genres unexplored and if the creator said it was art, the it

WAS art.

Starting with images and text, filmmaker Paul Sharits was largely responsible for the so called “flicker-

films” of the Fluxus movement. These films, often quite short and nonnarrative, comprise of a series of

single shot images, collaged in rapid succession so that no image lasts long enough to create meaning as

a whole. The images in Sharits’ films are not unlike the images being produced at the same time by

Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.

For his 48 second “Sears Catalog” from 1966, Sharits photographs individual items for sale through the

Sears catalog.4 The sheer quantity of available items presented to the viewer in such rapid succession as

to render them valueless is a profound critique of the consumerist culture of 1960w white America.

For Paul Sharits, text, perhaps even its “found text” was the invitation and inspiration to create. The

composition of his “flicker films” is simply the rapid succession of images without consideration of their

narrative impact – it is nothing more than the images themselves.

The Fluxus movement made an important impact on music as well. A series of works from the 1960s,

simply titled “Composition 1960” followed by a number, composer La Monte Young paved the way to

the work of minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. For his Composition 1960 #7, Young asked that

two notes, B3 and F#4 be held “for a long time” The work only invites two specifications – pitch and

duration. One performance of this work, organized by Young in 1963, lasted five hours. Other

Compositions 1960 are simply invitations, like number 10, who invites anyone to draw a straight line and

follow it. This single and focused event opened the door to a variety of compositions.

Illustration 1: La Monte Young, Composition 1960, #75

The rebirth of text driven artworks in the 1960s continued to influence a generation of artists working in

the United States and Germany. Returning to composition in 2009 after a ten year hiatus, American

composer Dean Rosenthal began to explore text driven compositions after realizing that traditional

notation could not offer the level of sophistication, imagination, a reckoning with history, inspiration

and execution. The composition of his stones/water/time/breath is the fruition of that long search.6

Rosenthal eloquently describes the genesis of this work and is candid with the kinds of personal and

psychological effects and consequences the work brings him.7 In his essay “Maybe They Are Already

There,” Rosenthal shares with us two performances of the work. The first, performed at the Edgartown

Great Pond in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, lasts approximately ten minutes. He is joined with his

wife who later explains that this is the location of their marriage.

The second recorded performance lasted approximately 18 minutes and takes place near his childhood

home in Wilbraham, Massachusetts – a suburb just 120 miles east of New York City. Somewhat

reminiscent of a Proust novel, Rosenthal recalls this particular performance bringing a torrent of

memories evoking his youth. His deeply moving and personal experience is unlikely to be experienced in

the same way by another, but perhaps the invitation is to find that inner space while performing the

work.

Here is a link from the second performance and I wonder if we as spectator, have the same kind of

experience with the work as its composer/performers.8

On January 26, 2013, Dorota Czerner and Russell Craig Richardson performed Rosenthal’s text score. In

his description of the performance, Richardson apologizes for the water having undergone a mood

change since the weather was a chilly -5C with the lowing wind making it feel closer to -11C. The wind,

Richardson remarks, was blowing towards the water. This is there video documentation of Rosenthal’s

text composition. Neither Richardson not Czerner give feedback in the way Rosenthal did. They do not

disclose how the piece made them feel, what kinds of emotional memories it might have triggered.

They do not even disclose why they chose the particular place for the performance. It is for me

however, a deeply engaging, evocative and emotionally charged work. All for reasons that are personal

and certainly not from anything overtly suggested or intended by the performers.9

IT SOUNDS GOOD TO ME

Perhaps one of the most intriguing results of our digital world is the amount of programs and apps that

now allow anyone, even those with absolutely no musical training, the possibility of composing,

recording and distributing their own quite professionally sounding music. The intentional blurring

between the professional and non-professional is now so ubiquitous that it seems to be a moot point.

Today one can make music that, as my students so frequently remind me in their own composition

lessons, just “sounds good to me.”

With a little help from digital technology, we can correct the pitch of a singer, stretch Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony to last 24 hours, record any natural sound and turn it into a beat – or simply hit “start” and a

completely randomly generated work can be mapped out for a string quartet. Not that these are bad

things mind you. In fact, many of these tools can aid a composer searching to transform any or all parts

of his imagination into a sonic landscape.

In some cases though we need to consider what, if any boundaries, exist between composer, performer

and listener – and perhaps I should start to include programmer.

Let’s start with a simple example – an app called “Circuli” it is free and allows its user to create randomly

generated “ambient music.” The app is written by Batuhan Bozkurt, a musician, sound engineer and

creative coder from Istanbul. The user interface is quite simple – several sized circles are enclosed in a

square frame. As the user touches one of the circles a bubble begins to grow at a constant rate. No

two bubbles (or circles as he calls them) can overlap. A sound is generated when a bubble pops and the

pitch is determined by the position of the bubble on the background. The bigger the starting circle the

higher the pitch. In the free version, a different set of pitches and timbres are uploaded daily and the

results of your composition can be shared by a unique URL code. The pay version (available for iPad,

Android and iPhones) offers the user more options and the ability to save a “scene.” Here is an example

of Circuli in action.10

Though most of the material is preconfigured, I do (and did) have the option to turn on and off the

sounds. So, I could, in the words of my students, create something that “sounds good to me.” To what

degree this is composition may be open to debate – some purists may think there is relatively little,

others may think it holds the key to their next CD.

Circuli is a rather simple example. There are quite a few apps though that have a level of sophistication

that again blurs the boundaries. In 2011, Icelandic composer and world pop music superstar Bjork

released an album called Biophilia and with it, an app where the user can manipulate the music in such a

way as to completely remix the original recording. . Bjork admits to composing most of the music on a

tablet and in addition to using a Tesla coil, she invented her own instruments to create the sounds her

imagination demanded.

Biophilia opens with a narration by British broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough describing the

app and the Biophilia project. The homepage, known in this app as the “mother, is a 3 dimensional

constellation of choices each coinciding with the songs heard on the album.

Illustration 2: “Mother” app graphic homepage from Bjork’s Biophilia

Each song is its own app allowing the user several options. Each song contains a short description and

an option to play the app, another option is to view the score (the user can turn off the vocals and sing

along with the music karaoke style) or just view the score to create their own realization of the song.

There is an animation option which links to animations created by Stephen Malinowski each song having

its own color scheme. A fourth option displays the lyrics to the song and the last option is to view the

credits for each song.

What makes the Biophilia app so forward thinking is that Bjork has created roughly two kinds of app

interfaces – one in which the user plays a kind of game with the sounds and other songs act as musical

instruments. Each owner of the app becomes a “collaborators” with a viable opportunity to manipulate

the resultant song (can you imagine that with a Schubert lied?)

For example, the app for the song “Moon” is a kind of music sequencer. A string of little pearls linked by

a kind of spine topped by a moon, a user can play the song as it was originally conceived or remix it by

rotating the pearls to change the notes. If the user rotates the moon, the number of notes played in the

sequence is changed. In a nice gesture, the app allows the user to save their changes - essentially saving

the re-composition of the original song.

Solstice offers an app that behaves more like a musical instrument. The user can pull strings out of a

ventral sun and create orbits around the sun and rotating planets just by touching the screen. The user

can use the planets to pluck the strings like a harp and by the way the user touches it, will determine

speed and whether the orbit is clockwise or counterclockwise. It is even possible to have multiple layers

of orbits – each create a rather complex polyrhythm. With the touch of a button the instrument turns

into a tree where the leaves and branches determine the musical material.11

Bjork’s Biophilia app has caught the attention of several notable institutions. After the release of the

Biophilia apps, Bjork introduced that education program as another layer of the album’s concept. The

Biophilia serves as a starting point for students, aged 10 to 12, who explore the intersection of science

and music. Students are encouraged to play with the instruments Bjork designed for the project, to

extract DNA from an onion, to being able to watch the division of a cell on a flat HD screen. The

program, originally rolled out in Reykjavik will last for 3 years and is sponsored by the Nordic Council and

the Ministry of Education and Culture in Iceland. Not surprisingly, students are asked to bring their

iPads or smartphones to the classroom in order to engage at the most active level. The project has been

renewed until 2016 and expanded to include other European countries.

The New York Museum of Modern Art has placed Bjork’s app into its permanent collection. According

to Paola Antonelli, senior curator of the Dept. of Architecture and Design, “I started thinking about

acquiring Biophilia when it was released in 2011. At that time, a year after the iPad had been

introduced, designers and developers were excitedly experimenting with apps that took advantage of a

screen bigger than an iPhone. With Biophilia, however, Bjork truly innovates the way people experience

music by letting them participate in performing and making the music and visuals, rather than just

listening passively.”12

VISUAL COMPOSITION

In 1961, American composer Vincent Persichetti released an important book called “Twentieth Century

Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practices. The opening works of this book are rather powerful –

especially if we consider that he may be addressing more than just music. He writes:

“Any tone can succeed any other tone, any tone can sound simultaneously with

any other tone or tones, and any group of tones can be followed by any other

group of tones, just as any degree of tension or nuance can occur in any medium

under any kind of stress or duration. Successful project will depend upon the

contextual and formal conditions that prevail, and upon the skill and the soul of

the composer.”13

If, for a moment, we think outside of music, we can see how this applies to much visual art stemming

from the late 1950s and early 1960s. If anyone is a master at the idea of combing any tone with any

other tone – or, rather any object with any other object, I would turn to American artist Robert

Rauschenberg. It was Rauschenberg who, in the mid-1950s was living with artist Jasper Johns began to

create artworks that incorporated various objects into, onto and attached to a painted canvas.

These works became known as combines and often present the viewer with seemingly unrelated objects

– a coke bottle here; a taxidermy bird there, or a tire wheel or bed. Rauschenberg – then a quite poor

artist living in the lower east side of New York searched trash piles to find objects he could incorporate

into his artworks (which now sell for the hundreds of millions by the way). Bed, of course, is a literal

description of the work, but it is essential to realize that Bed is also a deeply intimate place – can

Rauschenberg be making a statement about memory in a way similar to Dean Rosenthal’s work we saw

earlier?

Illustration 3: Robert Rauschenberg – Bed

Largely regarded as Rauschenberg’s most famous work is his Monogram – a taxidermy goat standing on

painted cardboard with a tire placed around its torso. This free standing work – which Rauschenberg

created between 1955 and 1958 is inspired not only by the work of his flat mate Jasper Johns but his

working with and around the American composer John Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham.

Illustration 4: Robert Rauschenberg – Monogram

Monogram is not a painting, nor a sculpture – rather a hybrid work that, like much progressive art, blurs

boundaries. As the Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz has said, “Rauschenberg contributed enormously to

postwar ideas about agglomeration, order, appropriation, duplication, assemblage, collage and photo-

in-painting, his esthetic garrulousness often turns his work into a department store: something

scanned, not studied. … Rauschenberg is so convinced that all things in the world are equal that the

work itself often equals out and gets slushy in the mind.”14

If we remember the American Abstract art movement of the 1950s we can have a way into the work.

Again Jerry Saltz says “Everything Abstract Expressionism was, Rauschenberg and Co. weren’t. Ab-Ex

was big, lofty, abstract and made by older straight men. This neo-Dada, proto-Pop and Pop art was

smaller, cooler, figurative, vernacular and often made by younger gay men. As Rauschenberg confessed,

“I could never make the language of Abstract Expressionism work for me – words like ‘tortured,’

‘struggle,’ or ‘pain,’ I could never see those qualities in paint. How can red be passion? Red is Red.

Jasper and I used to start each day by having to move out from Abstract Expressionism.”15 This battle

was clearly rendered visible when in 1953, Rauschenberg went to ask de Kooning for a drawing which

Rauschenberg could then erase.

Illustration 6: Robert Rauschenberg – Erased DeKooning

So, what does Monogram mean and in what way was it so integral to Rauschenberg’s work? Here is a

stuffed Angora goat with a tire around its waist. The snout of the goat is painted much as if it was

headed to war and he is standing on cardboard – perhaps a pasture where he will soon feed. In

Christian symbology the goat represents the damned – could this goat be a metaphor Rauschenberg?

And the tire that penetrates the goats body – is this too a metaphor for the awakening of

Rauschenberg’s sexuality? As Jerry Saltz has suggested, Monogram is Rauschenberg’s “Delphic rebel yell

that says, “I create and am part of this symbol of American openness even though as a gay man I am

shunned by it.” Monogram becomes Rauschenberg’s credo, ”a line drawn in the psychic sands of

American sexual and cultural values. It is a love letter, a death threat, and a ransom note. It is

Rauschenberg carving his monogram into art history.”16

TONY ORRICO

In a completely different way, dancer Tony Orrico leaves marks as a reminder of his work. Orrico

studied painting and in college began to attend a dance class his girlfriend was in. It wasn’t long before

he discovered a way to combine the two. Using his body he creates artifacts that are physical reminders

of his movements. He points to a very specific memory as the genesis as an artist. When he quite

young he learned how to paint flowers with his maternal grandfather. The impression of that event, the

smell of the paint, the feel of the studio and the pleasure of working on an object stayed with him.17

Orrico’s work is often process oriented and minimal in style and almost always performed in front of a

live audience. The end results are a detailed mapping of what his body has done. In 2011, his series

Penwald (which is the word for those who wish to become ambidextrous) Orrico uses marking objects in

both hands to create imprints on paper that replicate his movements.

When asked how he understood the two mediums to be interrelated Orrico gave a compelling answer.

“It is one sight; I see and interpret movement looks the same to me as how I interpret my ideas

mechanically from my hands. Point, line, plane, intersection, shape, color, texture, pattern, design,

architecture, etc. I am not looking at these disciplines separately right now. I am deriving at these

drawings either through movement improvisations or sketching in my journal.”18 How striking are his

words that remind us of the opening of Sondheim’s musical – the concerns of any artist appear to be the

same. Here is Tony Orrico performing Penwald 6: project, recoil.19

REAPPROPRIATION AS COMPOSITION

The idea of borrowing, stealing, taking from works of the past is no secret in our world. Even Stravinsky

said that lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. In the world of music today there is a tremendous

amount of music that relies on previous created material. Whether it is in the concert hall, or more

likely the dance hall – the element of borrowing seems endemic. And in the dance hall, the thief is

often the DJ. At first the DF’s responsibility was to mix beats together so that the dancers could

continue without much interruption. Later DJ began to introduce elements into the music that were not

originally there. Finally, the DJ began to create original works of music based entirely off of the ability to

sample the works of others. Now this led to much legal entanglements and it still isn’t clear to me when

the line is crossed between fair use and illegal appropriation. But I am now sure of this – the musical

efforts of DJs are just as sophisticated, musical and creative as any other – it’s just they use turntables as

their instruments.

I’ll just use one case that I hope will make this perfectly clear – Canadian DJ Eric San – known as Kid

Koala. His remarkable personality is apparent in his music as is his affection and devotion to the music

he uses in his own work. In addition to prerecorded music, Kid Koala also makes his own vinyl

recordings of sounds that he can play like music instruments on his turntable.

For me, his reworking of the class Henry Mancini tune Moon River is a tour de force of his musical and

technical virtuosity. Moon River, one of his mom’s favorite tunes is treated to an elaboration in much

the same way Luciano Berio appropriated Mahler’s Second Symphony for the second movement of his

Sinfonia.

Kid Koala uses the entire length of the original recording but then reworks it into an almost completely

new tune by manipulating the discs on hand. I’ll let you hear because it will be easier than describing

it.20

SO WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

“Look, I made this.” Isn’t that one of the most basic instinctual human impulses? That we put things

together, in whichever order we decide, and call it a thing in and of itself is little more than our basic

expression of creativity. The woman who makes the wedding dress is composing, the landscaper who is

deciding which plants will thrive is composing, and the musician working with an app is composing. In

one way or another, we are all expressing ourselves – but with one important element – that it be

understood by others. That if my work communicates with another says that my being human means

something, is valued and valuable. It is a kind of self-affirmation – I create, therefore, I am.

This urge to create, to compose, is in all of us and quite often is becomes suppressed sometime in our

youth. However, technology is changing all that. Technology says you can, or rather you ARE creative,

so join in and make a contribution. Yes, we can worry, as Georges Seurat did about

Order.

Design.

Composition.

Tone.

Form.

Symmetry.

Balance.

But these things can come later – perhaps if I continue my creativity and want to somehow improve or

strengthen my communications with others.

Composition is the result of our perception(s) or relationship(s) between juxtapositions. It becomes an

invitation to expression, of self, of culture, of our being human.

I love this quote by American painter Philip Guston (and close friend of American composer Morton

Feldman):

"When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, the

art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue

painting, they start to leave, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then,

if you're lucky, even you leave."

And now, it’s time for me to leave.

1 http://youtu.be/PiblYasnzWE 2http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2014/04/10/bird_guitar_art_exhibit_c_leste_boursier_mougenot_zebra_finch_guitar_installation.html 3 http://pem.org/sites/freeport007/behind_the_scenes 4 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xp268_sears-catalogue-1-3_creation 5 https://abjectivevitcejba.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/composition-1960-7-by-la-monte-young/ 6 http://www.deanrosenthal.org/ 7 http://deanrosenthal.org/writings.htm contains his essay about the work 8 https://vimeo.com/48593186 Rosenthal’s 2nd performance 9 http://vimeo.com/64045388 10 http://youtu.be/VEnF90rQYgo 11 http://youtu.be/dikvJM__zA4?list=RDd9ar6CiRIZI 12 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bjorks-biophilia-heading-to-european-classrooms-20140615 13 Vincent Persichetti – 20th Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice, p. 13

NY, WW Norton & Co., 1961

14 http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz1-11-06.asp 15 http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz1-11-06.asp 16 http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz1-11-06.asp 17 http://www.tonyorrico.com/Publications_files/Metropolitan.pdf

18 http://www.tonyorrico.com/Publications_files/Metropolitan.pdf 19 http://vimeo.com/23730493 20 http://youtu.be/fjFi4MHO_go