# Conceptual music



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> And I'll give you an example of music which I have a strong intuition is very good, a masterpiece. And I'll try to say why.
> 
> Peter Ablinger's _Piano and Record_ is the sound of an empty LP transcribed for piano. Example here, love it.
> 
> ...





BrahmsWasAGreatMelodist said:


> This is a late response, but I want to say thank you for sharing this brilliant piece of music. Ontological bliss indeed! It gets better with every listen.


Nsnsnsc,smmc. C,


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Peter Ablinger's _Piano and Record,_ which was the subject of the above conversation, is an example of conceptual music. It's _raison d'être _is an idea.

Has anyone here explored this type of music? What are your favourite examples?


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> Peter Ablinger's _Piano and Record,_ which was the subject of the above conversation, is an example of conceptual music. It's _raison d'être _is an idea.
> 
> Has anyone here explored this type of music? What are your favourite examples?


The problem here is that there are a lot of contemporary works that, at first glance, don't appear to be conceptual music but in fact are on closer inspection. Rihm's Jagden und Formen is a good example of this. At first, it sounds like a standard work for ensemble with a provocative, but ultimately meaningless, title. Sure, there are some thorny harmonies and some eccentric part writing, but that could just be ascribed to issues of style and whatnot. But once you read a little bit about the work and then compare it to related works like Gejagte Form or Verborgene Formen, you realize it's just as conceptual as Ablinger's Piano and Record and that the title "Hunts and Forms" really is a good description of what's happening.

So I guess what I'm getting at is that the so-called "conceptual music" you're looking for are the more "obvious" cases like the Ablinger?

One of those "obvious" cases I've always liked is _Run Time Error_ by Simon Steen-Andersen. It's not the prettiest piece in the world, but there are a lot of interesting takeaway ideas. Plus, I find something entertaining and funny about running through an obstacle course in the back rooms of a concert hall ("funny" in a good way).

Since every performance of it is site specific, it will be different every time, so here are a few performances on youtube:

Run Time Error @ Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre (2014)
Run Time Error @ The Free Exhibition Building (2009)
Run Time Error @ HOTELbich (2009 -- world premiere)

And here's another piece by Steen-Andersen called _The Loop of the Nibelung_. This is basically a Wagner-themed Run Time Error, written for last year's Bayreuth Festival.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

I don't how this fits, but I was reminded of it by your thread.

A long time ago when I was single and living in a run-down but large apartment, I had a box of vinyl records, which I had taken out of their covers. When people asked if I was not concerned about damaging the records I told them that they were a developing work - the music on them was being changed by the pops and scratches added and becoming new music.

Of course they thought I was being stupid. But it fit in with the other "art" in my apartment: a bag of dinner rolls I nailed to the wall and allowed to turn green with mold; a large tree limb that stretched from one corner of the living room to the next, and slowly fell apart.


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

I haven't heard any of these but the Westerkamp and the Prins, but I was just reading about some conceptual works in a book recently:

Hildegard Westerkamp: Kits Beach Soundwalk
Mamoru Fujieda: Patterns of Plants
Jürg Frey: Un champ tendresse parsemé d'adiuex (4)
Sergei Zagny: Metamusica
Robin Hoffmann: oehr
David Dunn: Purposeful Listening in Complex States of Time
Nigel Helyer: GeneMusiK
Jennifer Walshe: THIS IS WHY PEOPLE O.D. ON PILLS / AND JUMP FROM THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
Richard Beaudoin: Études d'un prélude
Stefan Prins: Generation Kill
Christian Marclay: Guitar Drag
Cynthia Zaven: The Untuned Piano Concerto


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> I don't how this fits, but I was reminded of it by your thread.
> 
> A long time ago when I was single and living in a run-down but large apartment, I had a box of vinyl records, which I had taken out of their covers. When people asked if I was not concerned about damaging the records I told them that they were a developing work - the music on them was being changed by the pops and scratches added and becoming new music.
> 
> Of course they thought I was being stupid. But it fit in with the other "art" in my apartment: a bag of dinner rolls I nailed to the wall and allowed to turn green with mold; a large tree limb that stretched from one corner of the living room to the next, and slowly fell apart.


That made me think of this, one of my favourite examples of conceptual art -- you'll be able to work out what happens









http://www.damienhirst.com/a-thousand-years


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I would guess the first (and most infamous) piece of conceptual music was 4'33".


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

In a way similar to the Ablinger in the first post of this thread, Peter Ablinger's Rain Piece for three pianos, I guess a transcription of rain. I think it's really beautiful - but is it conceptual music?


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> In a way similar to the Ablinger in the first post of this thread, Peter Ablinger's Rain Piece for three pianos, I guess a transcription of rain. I think it's really beautiful - but is it conceptual music?


There's two program notes on his website:



> The piece involves one tone in changing octaves (and very seldom a few additional pitches). There are 6 sections, all in the same sequence of registers, like one piece written 6 times - a series, but at the same time there's an almost hidden development through the 6 sections.
> 
> Coordinated by click-tracks, each performer plays independently within separate pulses that never meet within one piece. The piece focuses on the micro-rhythmical shifts between piano-attacks and their different location in space - an etude in listening to what is not obvious in its details as well as its silent evolution.





> A study for multi-temporal events: the same or similar process takes place simultaneously in different tempos, generating minimal rhythmic frictions and differences.
> 
> A series in 6 parts, the same time grid is traversed 6 times: differences do not matter. In other words, the fact that the six parts are differing from one another at all - while producing those subtle frictions and differences in the imaginary superposition of all six parts - results from a fundamental unavoidability: repetition can only be perceived in deviation.


If I'm hearing the piece correctly, what remains the same from section to section are the micro-rhythms that exist between the pianos, even though register is changing (I know the first program note says register sequence isn't changing, but that's not what I'm hearing). And I think the point of the piece is to direct your ears away from pitch and register as the dimensions where you hear discrete entities and direct them towards rhythm, asking questions like:

Can I detect repetition at the rhythmic level, all things being equal (in this case, equality at the level of pitch)? How much change/difference does there need to be for me to pick out the rhythmic repetition (in this case, differences in register)?
How much or how little silence must exist between two musical events for them to be considered separate?

By holding the micro-rhythms in place throughout the piece, Ablinger is testing us to see if we can pick out the patterns as the piece progresses (the "hidden development" mentioned above in program note 1 might be the development in our awareness). Despite the piece being called "Ohne Titel / 3 Klaviere", I think it was very smart of Ablinger to classify this work as one of his "rain pieces" because he's making the connection to how we listen to and enjoy the pattering of rain. Every raindrop sounds the same, more or less, when hitting the ground, so we become fascinated instead with the distribution of noise and silence at the micro level (e.g. we may hear a high density of droplets for a few microseconds followed by relative silence for a few microseconds after that, etc.).

With that said, I do think there are some issues with the piece. Each section (about 4.5 minutes long) is too long to retain in memory any subtle rhythmic patterns you might have picked up. I think the piece would've been far more effective if Ablinger instead wrote 100 small sections about 10-15 seconds each (with everything else about the piece remaining the same). That makes the task a bit more manageable without undermining the takeaway point.

Another problem I had was that, at times, I was grouping notes in my head according to register as well as rhythm. For example, I often marked off subsections that contained a preponderance of high-register Eb's from those that contained more middle-register and low-register Eb's. I'm not sure what Ablinger would make of that, if what he wanted us to focus on is rhythm.

A final thought: is there a connection between the spatial distribution of the three pianos with the spatial distribution of the three orchestras in Gruppen? Is Ablinger thinking along the same lines as Stockhausen? I don't know Gruppen well enough to answer, but that might be something to think about.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

He’s done two whole CDs worth of rain music, and I find them completely addictive and fascinating - much to my surprise because I’m not normally so interested in this sort of canonical process music (Tenney, for example, has not much caught my imagination with it.) 

I can let you have the recordings if you want.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Those interested in Ablinger may also be interested in this text score by Douglas Barrett - here in a discussion paper by James Saunders.

http://www.james-saunders.com/g-douglas-barrett-a-few-silence/


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> Those interested in Ablinger may also be interested in this text score by Douglas Barrett - here in a discussion paper by James Saunders.
> 
> http://www.james-saunders.com/g-douglas-barrett-a-few-silence/


I'll check this out later, but -- assuming they're available -- you should check out the Robin Hoffmann and David Dunn pieces I mention above, which seem to be going after related ideas. In the Hoffmann piece, the listener/performer is asked to cup their ears with their hands and move the hand positions around to create different ambient sounds. In the Dunn piece, the listener/performer goes through several outdoor environments and listens according to what the score asks. In other words, the score is a complex set of instructions for listening (or perhaps Dunn is saying that producing sounds by listening is no different than producing sounds by traditional means). I haven't heard the pieces myself, only read about them, but they sound pretty interesting.


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## John Lenin (Feb 4, 2021)

When the middle classes have nothing else to do but stare at themselves in a mirror


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

See what you think of this






probably not conceptual but still, I thought you'd be interested.


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## erki (Feb 17, 2020)

I love this stuff.
Steve Reich has a piece* Pendulum Music* that I like a lot as well:


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> Those interested in Ablinger may also be interested in this text score by Douglas Barrett - here in a discussion paper by James Saunders.
> 
> http://www.james-saunders.com/g-douglas-barrett-a-few-silence/


I just finished reading this. What I liked most was how the piece is broken down into two stages -- the transcription from ambient sound to written notation and the transcription from written notation to performance -- and that, when reading about the first stage, I had in my mind something totally different for what the second stage was going to be. For the second stage, I was anticipating something more conventional: I thought the written notation was meant to trigger a memory for the performer of what the original ambient sound was and therefore, the performer has to recreate it. But instead, Barrett wants the performers to read the notation at face value without using any of their memories of the original sound. No doubt this yields a completely different type of music than what I was imagining, music that is far more abstract and detached from the ambience of the performance site.

I guess my larger point is that it's amazing how these "concept pieces" are, in fact, built up from layers and layers of ideas which you can add and subtract at will and produce something substantially different, depending on your artistic aims. It's quite interesting how most of these concept pieces are very much related to one another, and you can pinpoint with considerable accuracy exactly which "concept layers" they share and which they don't. It reminds me of constructing arguments in my philosophy classes in that different combinations of premises will yield different conclusions, comparing different philosophers amounts to comparing which premises they share and don't share, etc. Of course, philosophy has further restrictions like searching for soundness and validity in an argument, but the basic methods seem to be the same.

For example, this piece by Barrett and the Steen-Andersen piece I posted above share the idea of considering and including the performance space in the compositional phase of the music, and both pieces share a lack of interest in recreating the original ambient sounds. But one place they differ, for example, is that in the Barrett piece, the composer has minimal interaction with the "physical substance", if you will, of the performance space, while the Steen-Andersen piece moulds the space like a piece of clay.


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## tortkis (Jul 13, 2013)

In Matthew Lee Knowles's _For Clive Barker_ for solo piano, every letter of Barker's book Hellraiser is turned into music. The total playing time would be about 26 hours.

_Every single letter of Barker's book has its own specific note, chord or motif that evolves throughout the thirty-thousand bars [...] varying based on the surrounding text in a multidimensional explosion of systems and connections, attempting to put into music the linguistic features that form the contents of the ocean, with its surface projection we skim across when reading._
http://matthewleeknowles.com/2021/01/for-clive-barker/

For Clive Barker (score only)


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

Rachenko. Call out operation New Russia. Everyone on Viber sing their part.


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## tortkis (Jul 13, 2013)

Milan Knižák: Broken Music





"Before everyone else - Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, eRikm, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide - there was Milan Knizak."

"In 1965 I started to destroy records: scratch them, punch holes in them, break them. By playing them over and over again (which destroyed the needle and often the record player too) an entirely new music was created - unexpected, nerve-racking, aggressive and even humorous. [...] I developed this system further. I began sticking tape on top of records, painting over them, burning them, cutting them up and gluing different parts of records back together, etc. to achieve the widest possible variety of sounds."


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