Chapter 2

Questioning open form (a theoretical discourse)

2.1 Definitions of open form

In the 1950's, the American composer John Cage started creating scores that provided information to the performers in an untraditional way. These scores did not provide the pitch and rhythmic information that performers were used to, but instead provided any kind of information that could be transmitted by graphics or verbal instruction. A group of composers, whose most important members were Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, was joining Cage in this development gathered around Cage and became known as The New York School. In Europe indeterminacy was applied as well independently from the American movement. Stockhausen used it for instance in his compositions Plus Minus and Klavierstück XI. After Cage visited the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1958, Cages philosophy and way of working became commonly known to the composers of the European Avant-garde.

How did composers refer to scores that did not entirely determine the outcome of the performance? John Cage never used the term “open form” when referring to this kind of scores. He always preferred “indeterminacy”, which is indeed more accurate, as we will discover. Another term that has been used to indicate pieces of this kind was “experimental music” by Michael Nyman¹. He considers “experimental music” as opposed to “avant-garde music”, which he explains had a very high degree of determination. Stockhausen uses the term “open form” in his text about Momentform², but he uses it in two ways: First, he refers to pieces that can be perceived as music of infinite length, that could have begun before the beginning and could continue after the end. The form is perceived as having no boundaries of beginning or end and is therefore called open form. Examples that he mentions include Gesang der Jünglinge and Kontakte. (These piece are not undetermined at all). Second, he refers to Klavierstück XI as having an open form. This piece uses indeterminacy for exactly the same purpose to create a form in which an eternal time field is expressed. Because in this concept any kind of development is excluded (this would lead to boundaries of beginning and end) the pianist may play the composed material in an order that is left undetermined. Now, in order to achieve a form that is perceived as “open form” in the sense of “expressing an eternal time field”, a form is created that is an “open form” in this sense, that the order in which events appear is undetermined. This agrees with the understanding of the term “open form” by several other composers, among which Earle Brown (member of the New York School), Konrad Boehmer³ and Wim de Ruiter⁴. In their understanding, a piece has an open form when the order of events is not determined by the score. If something else is undetermined, it is not the form that is open, but there is another kind of aleatoric principle. Earle Brown explains that open form requires determination of other aspects:

There must be a fixed sound content to establish the character of the work, in order to be called "open" or "available" form. (Earle Brown)⁵

Other composers use the term “open form” in a less specific way meaning what Cage meant by “indeterminacy”: something – it can be anything – is undetermined. It is not necessarily the order of events. The following quote by William Engelen, a composer inspired by John Cage, shows the use of “open form” in a broader sense:

For every composition I ask the musicians for their participation, to have their say, and I look forward to their input. It is a game of give and take. I submit my composition to them and they sound their instruments. At that moment I hear how the score is being read by them and we engage in a dialogue. That exchange has become dear to me and I would no longer want to write in any other way. While I make every effort to design my score as precisely as possible to express my idea of a sound, it nevertheless remains undetermined and open to various interpretations. This open form is my aim, as is the collaboration with the musicians and the live character of the performance.⁶

“Open form” is also used by theorists to indicate pieces from before 1950 that are not composed in a form defined by classical music theory, for instance a fantasy (open form) as opposed to a sonata form or a rondo. A recent example of this use is the book title Musical Improvisation and Open Forms in the age of Beethoven⁷. In this book, no aleatoric music is discussed, but rather pieces that have a form not defined by classical music tradition.

The article by Blumröder about Open Form in the Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie ⁸ gives the following definition of Open Form:

Offene Form

dtsch. (dabei Form im Mittelhochdtsch. als forme, äußere Gestalt, Umriß, aus lat. forma entlehnt), engl. open form.

I. Der Ausdruck offene Form begegnet seit dem Ende des 19. Jh. IN SINGULÄREN BELEGEN UND UNTERSCHIEDLICHEN MUSIKALISCHEN ZUSAMMENHÄNGEN.

II. In der VERWENDUNG MIT BLICK AUF DIE MUSIK NACH 1950 erscheint der Aus-druck offene Form seit etwa 1959 in zwei voneinander abweichenden Bedeutun-gen.

(1) K. Stockhausen versteht unter offener Form WERKE MIT ZIELLOSEM, UNABGE-SCHLOSSENEM MUSIKALISCHEM VERLAUF.

(2) Andere Autoren beziehen den Ausdruck offene Form auf WERKE MIT VERÄN-DERLICHER ÄUSSERER GESTALT. (a) Diese Auffassung wird seit etwa 1965 als HAUPTBEDEUTUNG IM SINNE EINER PLURALISTISCHEN SAMMELBEZEICHNUNG, zu-meist mit kritischen Anmerkungen versehen, tradiert. (b) Dabei steht des näheren die WAHRNEHMBARKEIT DER VARIABILITÄT in Frage. (c) Grundsätzlich reflektiert man den Terminus offene Form IN ABHEBUNG VOM ÜBERLIEFERTEN BEGRIFF DER FORM.

Christoph von Blumröder, Freiburg i.Br. 1984

HmT – 12. Auslieferung, Winter 1984/85

Blumröder states at (I): the term is in use in single documents from the end of the 19^th century. What it meant is not specified, and (II): from 1950 the term means (1) form that has no inevitable beginning or end or (2) form with variable formal shape.

The definition at II (2) agrees with the use of the term as in the quote above by William Engelen. The definition as used by Earle Brown, Wim de Ruiter and Konrad Boehmer is not mentioned at all.

In this research “open form” is understood as in II (2), with two remarks: first, it is not the form that is open (partially undetermined), but the score. The form is realized in the performance and is not perceived as variable; second, the question to which extent and in what way a score leaves room for variety in performance in order to be called open form should be discussed. Answering to the first remark, in this research “open form” is replaced by “open form score”. Answering to the second remark, in the next paragraph will be discussed to which extent and how two completely different pieces would be called “open form score” according to the chosen definition.

2.2 Two examples examined

Two scores will be examined for the extent to which their form is open according to the second definition by Blumröder:

         Ex. 2.1: J. S. Bach, Prelude in C major from WTK I                           Ex. 2.2 John Cage: Aria⁹

The first issue to consider is: what is the task of the performer in either one of these pieces? In the Prelude, the performer is asked to play the notated pitches in the exact order and rhythm notated. Meter gives a hint about articulation and which notes to emphasize, but this is in fact already interpretation, although common. The performer plays this on a harpsichord. We can conclude, the determined parameters are: pitch, relative duration, and instrumentation. Undetermined are: tempo, flexibility of tempo, articulation, color (register) chosen on the harpsichord. Performers who choose to play this piece on a piano consider the instrumentation as possibly broader than restricted to the harpsichord. They open up the score even more, adding the choice of the keyboard, the use of the sustain pedal and dynamics to the undetermined.

In the Aria, the task of the performer is quite different. The performer should choose 10 styles of singing in advance and connect these freely to the different colors and line styles drawn in the score. Explained is that the horizontal direction represents time, the vertical, pitch, as usual; on which scale is not explained. There are black squares added that indicate noises that may be produced with the voice in an unmusical way or with percussion instruments. Determined are: rough indication of relative duration, rough indication of pitch, amount of distinctive singing styles and noises, text. Undetermined are: tempo, pitch range, dynamics, instrumentation of the noise-sounds.

From this analysis it cannot be concluded that one of these pieces is more of an open form than the other. The division of how much is determined and how much is undetermined turns out to be actually quite comparable. However, this conclusion does not match the experience of most musicians. This could be explained by saying that what is determined in the Prelude is more identical to what we are used to being determined in the Western classical tradition. The Aria is not more open, it only draws the line between the determined and the undetermined in a way that renews and challenges our traditional thinking on what a score is and what music is.

If it is true that both forms are to a comparable degree open, we should also find a degree in differences of performance that would be comparable for both pieces. Listening to performances leaves us with the impression that this is true. Different performances of the Prelude show exactly the given space of the undetermined: different kind of keyboards and registers are chosen; although all notes are played well, refined differentiation of articulation and, if possible, dynamics (for instance between the hands) will be audible. To compare their differences we would have to value them: how much difference does a small and nearly unnoticeable tempo fluctuation combined with a slight articulation change in the Prelude make compared to choosing a different percussion instrument in the Aria?

We may assume that great composers whose works still stand after their lifetimes notated exactly what mattered to them, not by defining all exact movements the performer should make through strict instructions, but by drawing and guiding our attention to that information that leads us to a fulfilling - but possibly every time different - performance.

2.3 Why write an open form score?

To this question different composers who used indeterminacy have different answers. Here are a few examples of their thoughts:

John Cage: “I still believe that the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences. (…) A sober and quiet mind according to perennial philosophy is one that is free of its likes and dislikes.” As the mind should be free of likes and dislikes, our perception of musical sound should be free of symbolic meaning that we attach to it: “Knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustic details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.” Sounds are already interesting as they are without compositional interference. Also combinations of sounds reveal their truth already without being composed: “I assume that relations would exist between sounds as they would exist between people and that these relationships are more complex than any I would be able to prescribe. So by simply dropping that responsibility of making relationships I don’t lose the relationship. I keep the situation in what you might call a natural complexity that can be observed in one way or the other”. To the question, if he then prefers natural chaos above creation of order in a composition, Cage answered: “That is what we live in.” And so would his compositions be: partially undetermined in order to show natural chaos that might be an order on a higher level, or not.

Earle Brown: In the preface of “Available forms”, a composition for large chamber ensemble, Earle Brown writes that he left some choices open to the performers because in this way the performed sound event would be an expression of the co-related involvement of the participants.

Morton Feldman: “Only by unfixing the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sound exist in themselves – not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.” The aleatoric principle would in this thought serve the purpose of liberating sounds from a remembered traditional context.

Christian Wolff: “One day I said to myself that it would be better to get rid of all that – melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. This was not a negative thought and did not mean that is was necessary to avoid them, but rather that, while doing something else, they would appear spontaneously. We had to liberate ourselves from the direct and peremptory consequence of intention and effect, because the intention would always be our own and would be circumscribed, when so many other forces are evidently in action in the final effect.”

Ray Murray Schafer: “We must reach out and invent new art-forms in the hope that this integrity, never absent in the games of children, may return to all of us.” In a publication about music education¹⁰ he examines ways of working with children in which they would not get stuck in notational issues. He argues in music education there should always soon be something sounding, because otherwise it is not music, and he invents untraditional ways of notating music through which children can reach working with sound faster than through traditional notation. Not only in education, also in his compositions Schafer makes use of graphic notation, game rules or improvisation instructions. His goal is natural expression: “Today we are searching above all for natural expression.”

Already mentioned is Stockhausen, who wanted to achieve the expression of an eternal time field by excluding composed developing directions and made the form of Klavierstück XI flexible because in this way all events would be positioned equally in eternal time.

2.4 The research relating to open form

In the first phase of the research open form was not consciously used. There were instructions for improvisation that in a later stage would have been called open form scores, but in the first phase, they were not recognized like that. The need for an open form score was felt when one group wanted to perform improvisations in a concert. The purpose of this open form score was to create a framework to improvise on by a specific group who had been attending courses in improvisation. This framework was called an open form score.

It is obvious that the purpose – why create an open form score? Why not forego the score entirely? Why not determine everything? – guides how to create the score. Since every purpose mentioned above is hardly comparable to the aim of this project, none of them were considered to be taken as a source. The aim was to start all over again taking the actual practical situation as a starting point. The source was only our own imagination and the things the performers could already improvise.

Afterwards it was perfectly possible to describe how the outcome of the project – the composition View from a high mountain – related to the above mentioned angles to indeterminacy. For each composer mentioned above, a description can be made of how the project View from a high mountain relates to their ideas:

Cage: The aims of Cage and reasons for indeterminacy are not at all comparable to the project. Cage excludes conscious intention. In the project, intention from the performers was highly encouraged.

Earle Brown: The quote above shows an intention similar to the project, but the material he uses in his scores would not relate to the style of the performers who were involved in the project, whose improvisations were partially tonal or dealing with consonant sounds.

Feldman: The idea of perceiving sound without imagining its traditional symbolic meaning is interesting and useful to practice for improvisers. Improvisers nowadays will do this more easily than at the time Feldman made this observation because they hear a lot of music in which traditional interpretation of sound (such as that the leading tone should solve, etc.) is already abandoned (music in movies, media).

Wolff: Indeed one of the conclusions of the project matches exactly with the thought expressed here by Wolff, that materials like melody, rhythm and harmony will be the ones that are easily produced by musicians without predetermining them. This was found in the final conclusion of the project and had not been expected before.

Schafer: The wish for a natural expression is certainly shared with Schafer. His scores are understandable sources for inspiration. For the project they could nevertheless not be an exact example because more specific ways of handling material in different improvisation strategies were searched for, rather than the ones present in Schafer’s graphic scores. In Schafer’s scores, there is determined, nearly tonal material next to undetermined material of which the outcome is probably atonal. In this research strategies were looked for that would combine improvisation instructions also with tonal or consonant sound, which implies that the instructions must involve some clues on how to handle pitch and harmony.

Stockhausen: The project had nothing in common with the idea of using indeterminacy for the reason of expressing eternal time.

____________

¹ Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music. Cage and beyond. London: Cassel and Collier Macmillan Publishers Limited, 1974.

² Stockhausen, Karlheinz. „Momentform“. In Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, Band 1, p. 189-210. Köln: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1963.

³ Boehmer, Konrad. Zur Theorie der offenen Form in der Musik. Darmstadt: Edition Tonos, 1967.

⁴ Ruiter, Wim de. Compositie-technieken van de twintigste eeuw. Haarlem: De Toorts, 1993.

⁵ Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music. Cage and beyond. London: Cassel and Collier Macmillan Publishers Limited, 1974, p.58

⁶ Schröder, Julia and Volker Straebel. Cage & Consequences. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2012, p. 193-194.

⁷ Borio, Gianmario and Angela Carone. Musical improvisation and open forms in the age of Beethoven. Abingdon, Oxon: Routlegde, 2018.

⁸ Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich. Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985.

⁹ With permission by Edition Peters, office New York. 

¹⁰ Schafer, R. Murray. The rhinoceros in the classroom. Canada: Universal Edition, 1975.

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