Zita Fabbri: I note that Ian Pace remarked that “Playing piano piece 2 required a re-thinking of many aspects of my approach” (BBC Radio 3, Hear and Now profile, 2001).
Gordon Downie: Learned, pre-compiled, or conditioned responses inhibit critique and the development of open consciousness - from some analytical perspectives one might conclude that is their purpose. Learned, pre-compiled, or conditioned responses mask the ideologies and knowledge structures that underpin them. To unmask them one needs to problematize the medium and/or disrupt processes of communication. This can be done via a critique of the notational codes employed. In piano piece 2, this process of problematisation is applied to all aspects of temporal organisation: time-point and impulse specification and assignment, impulse durations, the complex, probabilistic spaces within which they are articulated (what we usually call meter), their interpenetration, and the notational or communicational codes employed. This process of hyper- or total-specification – otherwise referenced as total organisation - significantly increases the amount of information and specification contained in the score. This should not surprise us: it is an indication that the composer seeks control over the signifying capacity of the medium: the extent to which this may ‘fail’ is of no consequence in this context. Under-specification and weak organisation, which is the norm, avoids the inherent communicational deficits and problematics that are an integral part of any communicative act, via the use of an impoverished set of notational codes the simplicity of which guarantees their - apparent - success. For purposes of illustration, we may characterise total-specification with the value 1.0 whilst under-specification may be assigned the value 0.6. During a communication event, we might then ask what compensates for this deficit or fills this space generated by under-specification? I would posit that it reveals a creative and organisational dependency on composers’ part upon external referents and actors over which there is little or no control or determination. This accounts for the not infrequently chaotic complexion of much output, especially during the 20th and 21st centuries, as I have discussed in Aesthetic Necrophilia and as we have further outlined earlier. The apparent aridity and hyper-formalism of a work of total-organisation, and the processes of problematisation generated (and by arid we refer to a circumscribed, bounded, and regulated space of communication) is simply a moment of clarity, in this context a power shift toward the composer.
ZF: Does this process result in information over-load? If so, is this intentional?
GD: This constitutes a stimulating critical space. In this context, the score - the stimulus in feedback model 1 and 2 - creates an experimental space, a testing ground, a laboratory if you will, for examining information processing, for evaluating and observing subject responses to and processing of, certain types of visual data, for exploring how input is processed by sensors, and how decisions or goals are determined that generate the responses, output and behaviour of effectors - those parts of the human anatomy responsible for action in this context. The stimulus or input functions to examine and/or test or evaluate reaction times, the operation of various sensory modalities, and the relationships between these modalities, neural processing, and motor responses. Reaction times determine the time period between the presentation of a stimulus and a motor or muscular response. The more accessible or simple the stimulus or input, the more efficient and less prone to error will be the subject response and performance. The more inaccessible or complex the stimulus or input, the more problematized and error-prone will be the subject response and execution. The notations employed in piano piece 2 present a multiplex of information often working in parallel. At their most densely articulated, I would hypothecate that these quanta or bits of information, directives, and specifications generate significant processing overheads and responsibilities, certainly when compared to most musics. Once we acknowledge such overheads, we can consider how subjects adjust their behaviour in response, with a view to evaluating processes of this kind. Research identifies adjustments subjects employ to manage extreme informational parallelism (Miller, 1962). A subset of these categories, applicable, I would suggest, to performer and auditor, are helpful in this analysis and are reproduced here:
Omission: do not process certain information
Error: process information incorrectly
Filtering: systematic omission of certain information according to a priority scheme
Approximation: less precise processing
Escape: leave the processing situation
Related analyses, music-specific in orientation, can be found in Moelants’s analysis of Karel Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos (Moelants, 2000). All five categories involve the performer (or auditor) making adjustments of some kind to manage the processing of multiple informational strata. Failure or Approximation occurs when the information is processed incorrectly or sub-optimally, or is simply omitted to enable the successful processing of competing information. Alternatively, a performer can employ a more systematic method of prioritisation, explicitly Filtering certain categories.
ZF: In piano piece 2 it is clear that you seek to concretise or materialise notation, to foreground it so that its signifying function is lessened or re-formed, so that it does not so much represent an idea, but it is the idea, or at least an important part of the idea. In this case, the visual channel or modality of information exchange is foregrounded.
GD: We might posit that standardised music notation is equivalent to representational visual art – it captures and represents external stimuli, it transcribes externalities. Non-representational music notation, of which piano piece 2 is an example, is in many ways equivalent to non-representational art, which is self-referential, having either no or very weak external referents.
ZF: Yes, as Javier Villanueva observed, “in your work the score is not a medium of summarized information but the composition” (Personal communication, 2009). So, given this complexity, as you assert, the notation functions as a barrier, as a check, to non-reflective response: notation as (self) surveillance, perhaps?
© Gordon Downie, 2024