Bird-like Things in Things like Trees exists in multiple, co-mingled forms: the visual works in their various forms, the concert work performed by Harmonious Blacksmith, and the installed, acousmatic soundscape derived from past performances of the concert work. The network of works engage with several distinct and, perhaps, interrelated aspects of practice. The inescapable historicity of the present, the tension between the mimetic and the ekphrastic, and the contingency of expression (especially expression in performance) on memory are all in operation, threading through the visual and musical components of the collective work. The instruments, with their Baroque origins, evoke long past sound-worlds, but deploy emphatically Modern musical material. The work also presents a strong sense of memory, of recovered experiences of the lines-of-flight of birds, of the speed of the river Garonne, of wind in trees, crepuscular murmurings. The audience is presented with traces of sense memories avian and arboreal, but the possibility of a mimetic, imitative, and verisimlar compositional stance is quickly abandoned, as the paintings and musical sketches move away from portraiture and towards an iterative cycle of representation and representation, in which the originary source material is only occasionally clearly visible or audible;– more often the material is so completely 'worked' that the connection to source is lost, replaced by connections to subsequent iterations of 'working.' This folding and refolding of the gap between experience and memory transitions events into memory, memory into speculation, and speculation back into being.
In these sequential rearticulations, the gap between speculation and event comes to the fore alongside compositional practices associated with chance, speculation, andd coincidence. The work involves the rhythmic aleatory of frame cell notation, chanced based durational structuring devices manifest in 'random walks' through the Fibonacci series, and extensive passages of solo and group improvisation. Writ large, the meta-compositional process, the coming together of multiple artists from multiple locations and disciplines to produce a particular performance of a particular work similarly enters into the realm of seeming coincidence, in which happenstance plays a major role in the works becoming real.
I find the term 'tychism' as a somewhat antique but highly appropriate word to describe this aspect of musicking. Tychism is a concept developed by C.S. Peirce to describe the emergence of order from chance events. (Peirce's friend and colleague William James perhaps articulated his friend's idea more succinctly, calling tychism "Peirce's suggestion [that] order results from chance-coming."). My hope is that these techniques will make overt the dynamics of performance which are always in play, but are sometimes masked behind the edifice of precision and accuracy, and remind us that we are, composers, performers and listeners, all partners in the drawing of order out of chaos, chronos out of aion.
Peirce describes the notion as follows:
"...I endeavored to show what ideas ought to form the warp of a system of philosophy, and particularly emphasized that of absolute chance... I argued further in favor of that way of thinking, which it will be convenient to christen tychism (from {tyché}, chance). A serious student of philosophy will be in no haste to accept or reject this doctrine; but he will see in it one of the chief attitudes which speculative thought may take, feeling that it is not for an individual, nor for an age, to pronounce upon a fundamental question of philosophy. That is a task for a whole era to work out."
('The Law of Mind', CP 6.102, 1892)
Though unfamiliar, it is preferable to the terms already in use: "Indeterminate" is a bit inelegant and imprecise; much is still determined by the composer. It has implications of abandonment, rather than mutuality. Similarly, aleatory, used most often to describe the works of Cage, is problematic. The term became known to European composers through lectures by acoustician Werner Meyer-Eppler at Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in the beginning of the 1950s. According to his definition, "a process is said to be aleatoric ... if its course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail" (Meyer-Eppler 1957, 55). This emphasizes a lack of human agency, while in my view the impact of the technics are actually exactly the opposite, a surfeit of agency and a multiplication of agents. '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 this discussion. Ludism has picked up associations with 'game pieces' and so runs the risk of obscuring the point that all works and actions are, in a very real sense, games. 'Improvisation', though it captures the character of real time decision making, tends to minimize the bundling of individual decision-making through notational devices and conventions of praxis.
So, tychism as a philosophical frame forces to the surface surface issues of identity, collectivity, and agency; a performance, and even a work, is the product of the actions of many individuals. As Peirce wrote in his essay 'Some consequences of Four Incapacities,' "We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it there for the community of philosophers." Tychism speaks not only to the happenstance of events, but of the interplay between chance, action, the individual and the work. This is a cutting back the roll or impact of the composer or artist; rather, it is that composers never had that kind of control to begin with.
The composition of this work has been supported by a grant from the George Washington University.
