On choosing my selection of short pieces by John Cage, I decided to select some that were composed by the ‘chance’ method, and some that weren't, so that I’d be able to form a comparison.
I was interested to discover that generally speaking I enjoyed the pieces that were not composed by chance to a greater extent. I think this may have been because I felt that these had a greater purpose and direction, and seemed to be ‘going somewhere’.
For the most part, I think the pieces I listened to could all constitute music, with the exception of Imaginary Landscape No.4. This is because this work doesn't feature melodies or rhythms (except for snippets that happen to be being broadcast at the time). Even though there is some direction from the composer, essentially it consists of a loosely organised collection of non-musical sounds. I understand and can appreciate the concept here, and it makes for great thinking on the subject, but would I call it ‘music’? Perhaps not, I’d prefer to use something like ‘Sound Experiments’, or ‘Sound Sculpting’. Using non-musical sounds to support music is one thing, but I think using exclusively non-musical sounds is quite another. (To clarify, by non-musical sounds I mean something like the rustling of paper, traffic noise, sound of the TV or radio etc. as opposed to actual musical pitches vibrating at a regular frequency).
As a comparison to chance music, I listened to two pieces composed by Arnold Schoenberg using the serial system. These were ‘prelude from suite pour piano op.25’ and ‘rondo from wind quintet op.26’. Both feature a random sound and lack of discernible tonality and rhythm.
Side by side, pieces composed in the serial system and ones composed using the chance system sound very similar to me, in that it sounded disorganized, lacking in tonality, and generally feeling wayward and indecisive. I am aware that serial pieces do have a structure, but to someone unfamiliar with the workings of the system, this is not readily apparent.
The biggest difference I could gather is that the serial system deals with the organisation of musical pitches, and so is played on musical instruments (or voice), whereas pieces composed by chance can be the product of anything, even short-wave radios as in ‘Imaginary Landscape No.4’.
All music offers a greater reward to the listener who knows a little of the form of the piece, but I think systems like serial and chance require a fairly robust knowledge from the outset, else the work can sound chaotic and in disarray. The layperson could listen to and thoroughly enjoy a Beethoven symphony without knowing the first thing about sonata form, but I don’t think the same applies to serial and chance.
I think it is certainly possible, even usual, to gain a sense of emotional impact from music without knowing anything about its constituent parts, and how those parts fit together. The majority of people in the world who listen to music don’t have any musical knowledge, yet are moved by the music they listen to on a daily basis. A piece like Whitacre’s ‘Sleep’ evokes a feeling of purity and serenity, Holst’s ‘Jupiter’ a sense of triumph, and Mussorgsky’s ‘Night On Bare Mountain’, a feeling of fear and dread. All three works accomplish their aims through use of melody, dynamics and rhythm. These emotion responses are powerful, even when the listener has no concept of their musical make-up.
I don’t feel that a chance-composed piece is able to deliver the same impact as the above examples. Chance pieces are just that – even though the composer sets up the ‘environment’ (the radios in Imaginary Landscape 4 for example), the final resulting outcome is a roll of the dice; literally left to chance. There is no ability here to mold a musical journey through the timeline of the piece. This is the polar opposite to traditional composition methods, where a composer carefully crafts each moment of the piece to manipulate the listeners’ emotions.
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