A score of the work, with a User's Manual, can be found here:
Occurrences Score
The Occurrences, like much of my music, asks performers and audiences to interrogate the conditions of the production of musical time, the nature of the basic building blocks of rhythm: pulse, meter, beat. My music could be described as 'indeterminate,' a rather inelegant term of our art, a negative definition which has the positive attribute of calling attention to the fact that that not all elements of a given work (ie: the tradition 'composerly' features like notes, and the rhythmic disposition of the notes) are as fixed as one generally finds in concert music. Some of these features will be left open to the decisions of musicians in the moment of performance. 'Open' would seem a more attractive term, though its use in literary theory would emphasize the impact of these structures on the 'meaning' of the work, which is not really the focus of the techniques. Similarly, aleatory, used most often to describe the works of Cage, brings in the notion of chance and emphasizes a lack of human agency, when the gesture of the technics are actually exactly the opposite, a surfeit of agency. 'Improvisation', though it captures the character of real time decision making, tends to minimized the channelling of decision-making through very precise and detailed techniques of notation. Given the difficulties with terms (aleatory, improvisation, etc), all fine terms already doing good work in the musical discourse, I suggest the use of the term 'tychism' as a somewhat antique but highly appropriate term. Tychism is a concept developed by C.S. Peirce to describe the emergence order from chance events. It was appropriated into the first debates around Darwinian evolution but it in its original form the usage was much more general and ontological, a way of understanding the universe at fundamental levels. Peirce's friend and colleague William James perhaps articulated his friends idea more succinctly, calling tychism "Peirce's suggestion [that] order results from chance-coming." It should be noted that my point in calling for the usage of this term is not to imply that my work requires a new language for description, but rather that there is a tychastic element to all musical expressions, and that the development of a language to describe them is of use. Occurrences presents the performer with numerous choices in the sequence, repetition and duration of various melodic fragments or 'strophes.' The work is a mobile form in the classic sense– according to rules laid out in the score, the performer chooses the sequence of much of the material, and the duration of specific passages. In several instances material maybe be skipped altogether; in Occurrence III, almost 50% of the notated music will not sound in any particular performance. Within set parameters, the performer shapes the formal and rhetorical organization of the piece at a fundamental level. The Occurrences are also conceptualized as dispersed structures, appearing on a program interspersed among other works. As such, they occupy a space between our categories of ‘movements’ and ‘works.’ All Occurrences share material (in the sense of motivic, intervalic and rhythmic content) and employ similar strategies of notation and organization, and yet are distinct in affect and character. In this work, the traditional role of the composer as provider of order and sequence is transferred in part to the performer, and the composer is more involved in the management of possible successions, and the issues of consistency and discontinuity which open forms present. Occurrences is dedicated to Miranda Cuckson, who commissioned the work.
