The Piece Titled Ordinatio - Essay Example

Other (s) Commentary of my Music chapter 2 Commentary of Ordinatio (4 clarinets in Bb) The piece titled “Ordinatio” which is one of the three pieces of the chapter 2 of my composition is an example of a mobile form (polyvalent) of chance music where by the order of the sections and movements in the composition is indeterminate and left to be decided by the performer. For example, although some of the details of my composition in the piece are clearly indicated, the overall form is generally left to the choice of the performers. Mobile form of music has been widely used by composers and artists to give performers partial or total freedom during the performance of a number of parameters of the composition including the pitch, form, durations and notes of the particular pieces (Salzman, 161). Mobile or open form chance music its roots in the works of previous influential artists like Roman Haubenstock-Ramati who compost a series of polyvalent musical pieces such as his famous piece known as Interpolation in the year 1958. Another good example of the use of mobile form musical composition was seen In Terry Riley’s 1964 composition titled In C which consisted of 53 short sequences allowing each member of the performers to repeat the sequence as much as they liked before proceeding to the next sequence. With a fixed pulsing rhythm, the details of each of the performance in the piece “In C” was however unique and the overall course was fixed. Composed for 4 clarinets in Bb, I was particularly influenced by the fact from my piece “Regeneration” that in the end of the piece the performer has to choose between the 2 endings. I have used a number of “mobile form” chance musical compositional techniques to ensure that the order of the sections and movements in the composition is indeterminate and left to be decided by the performers. Open form in the musical composition is normally vividly used in composition in relation to its mobile nature which involves the nature of movement in this musical composition which is either indeterminate or left in the court of the performer. As evidenced in my composition“Ordinatio”, the concept of open form chance music as used in the 20th century is often associated with giving freedom of choice regarding the movements of the composition and the order of sections to the performers. In this regard, the input of the composer is significantly reduced to merely preparing the elements that are needed to b assembled during the musical performance. I was Inspired from the earlier open and closed chance musical pieces such as Klavierstücke (Stockhausen) and Boulez 3rd piano sonata. Klavierstücke which is also known as Piano pieces is a series of a number of compositions which were done by the famous German composer Stockhausen. Throughout the composition, Stockhausen used controlled chance in the serial compositions as well as musical spatialization based on the concept of moment form. The durations are particularly founded on a set of matrices each with six rows and between 2 to seven columns. Additionally, each of the first row of the rhythm matrices is made up of a sequence of arithmetic duration values. On the other hand, Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata is another famous open form chance compositional piece that represented a modern controlled chance and attempted some reformation of aleatoric music (Harbinson, 18). Initially performed in 1958, the motivating pressure on Boulez was the desire to further explore aleatoric music. However Boulez only managed to release two movements of Sonata in the year 1963, together with a fragment of others. The rest of the other movements were actually never implemented according to the satisfaction of the composer. The movements (formants) in Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata included Antiphonie, trope, constellation, strophe and sequence. Using elements of controlled chance in his composition, Boulez used the articles “Ala” and “Sonate que me veux-tu” to formulate his particular insights on aleotoric musical composition. Consequently, as an example of the early mobile form chance music, the composition “Third Piano Sonata” allowed performers to choose from a number of options that have prepared during the composition. Open form music is also more often used to define the art to mean a work a work which is either basically left hanging or uncompleted (Jean–Jacques, 134). The open form musical composition can as well be of open or of closed nature where the musical composition is usually done in short sentences where various the given sentences are recited as many times as preferred by the composer before going to the next level thus making the details of these form of musical performance to be of unique nature and one of its kind in the music world. In the open music composition, the term aleatoric is often used to absorb the use of fairly restricted number of possibilities which are to some extent often present in the open form music. The composition and reciting of these form of gene is always considered a precedent a conclusion which was made when the catholicon came into existence exemplified in relation to the Missa cuviusvis. Additional details regarding the composition of open form music either the closed or open genre involve the Mosaic quartet which makes composition providing an allowance for the players to arrange open music in a number of different possible series. The sequences involved in the musical composition also allow for different short patterns with specific rhythm and pitches with various instructions that are performed frequently. One of the earlier mobile form musical pieces that significantly inspired my composition “Ordinatio” is an interesting German musical dice game known as Musikalisches Würfelspiel attributed to Mozart. Popular in Western Europe in the 18th century, the musical dice game generally involved the use of dice during composition to randomly generate music. For example, 272 musical measures as well as a table of rules were used during the musical dice game to help composers select particular measures given a dice roll. The game often resulted in randomly selected 16 bar minuet as well as 16 bar trio. Additionally, Mozart presented all the possible choices were in such a way that any selection resulted in a pretty minuet melody that fulfilled both the compositional and harmonic requirements of the minuets of the time. There were however, a number of musical dice game attributed to other composers other than Mozart in the late 18th and towards the beginning of the 19th century which as well composed several pieces of open form music based on chance operations and this articulated additional sense of uniqueness in this genre formation and composition. Throughout my piece “Ordinatio”, the use of mobile form (open form) is widely visible in the bars 23, 25 among others. Additionally, I have included the use of Classical notation (limitation) with strict rhythm which is based the harmony of the piece example from bar 12. Lastly, I have used 6 notes and I make abstractive procedure (notes: B, Ab, E, Anatural, Csharp and D) as is evident in bar1. As a result in my piece “Ordinatio”, the performers have been given the freedom with regard to the performance of different elements of the musical piece including the rhythm and the pitch. Additionally, an important element of chance in the third pierce of my composition is that the performers are free to decide on the order of the various performing elements as well ass their selection during the performance. However, one of the most important challenges that I faced during the composition of the piece “Ordinatio” was how to ensure the preservation of the identity of the piece elements in such a way that the composed structures are able to adapt to the variations in the choices of the performers. As a result I have made sure that each of the compositional structures are composed in such a way that they can easily to be connected both at the beginning and at the end of the other structures so as to provide a formal continuum in the musical progression. This is particularly similar to a piece known “Piacere” composed for piano in the late 1962 by Serocki. For example, throughout his piece, Serocki achieved a significant coherent musical progression by leaving it to the performers to make their own choices regarding the order of the basic structures of the piece. In summary, I have successfully used open form chance musical composition in my piece“Ordinatio”. Consequently, some of the elements that have been left to chance in the composition include the pitch, duration, medium form and expression of the music. Apart from leaving certain aspects of the composition up to chance, this will also provide the performers with additional creative responsibilities during the performance. Commentary of the piece “Nos dec” My fourth piece “Nos dec” is another aleotoric composition based on the use of indeterminate notations such as graphic notations. I particularly derived the name “Nos Dec” from a Latin words Dec and Nos. “Dec” which means ten and is a reflection of the number of seconds the notes in the composition can be played. On the other hand, “Nos” is a Latin which simply means “our” and is therefore a suggestion of the significant role of the performers since the composition is intended to allow them to improvise as opposed to playing a traditional musical score. In this kind of indeterminate music, elements of chance are usually involved in the performance. For example, although the notated events are provided by the composer of the musical piece, the arrangement of such events and scores is generally left to the determination and choice of the performer. Although I had a number of different kinds of graphic scores to choose from during the composition, I realized that some of them would provide the performers with little instruction regarding performance and will therefore require amore interpretive strategies. My piece “Nos Dec”, which is generally, a string quartet composition, is primarily based on Aleatoric technique of using indeterminate notations such as graphic notations to provide the performers with an opportunity to improvise as opposed to playing a traditional musical score. In fact the title of my own piece is a rearrangement of the letters of the word “SECOND”. In the composition, there are points in the score where the performer plays notes freely for a stipulated number of seconds. The use of improvised skeletal indications of what is elements of the composition provides some form of indeterminacy where by the performer achieves some significant freedoms of choice during the performance. For example, although the structure, duration, frequency and method of the musical composition have been determined, the other characteristics such as timbre and amplitude are considered indeterminate since they are not given. Works Cited Salzman, Eric.Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction, 4th edn. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.Print. Harbinson, William G.. “Performer Indeterminacy and Boulezs Third Sonata”. Tempo (New Series) no. 169 (1989): 16–20. Print. Jean–Jacques, Nattiez. The Boulez–Cage Correspondence, trans. Robert Samuels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993. Print. p.134. Toop, Richard. “Stockhausens Other Piano Pieces.” The Musical Times 124.1684 (1983): 348-52. Print. Read More