Compositions that Teach: Open Form

`Open' and `Didactic'

There exist pieces about which it is said that they were composed for didactic purposes. Those pieces remain of interest to the extent that the pieces exceed didactic purposes, or to the extent that the pieces dignify didactic purposes (against the pejorative sense given to `didactic'), or to the extent that the pieces and didacticism are at cross-purposes.

Instances: The books of preludes and fugues by Bach, Die Kunst der Fuge; Chopin Etudes and Preludes; Debussy Etudes--but with `etudes', `studies', the question arises whether these are studies for their composers, or studies for their students? Etude books for instrumentalists could, while ostensibly posing problems for playing technique, also address problems of composition.

Bartok and Ravel took the assignment to write easy-to-play pieces as an opportunity to create effects they would not have been able to achieve without this constraint. Ravel's Mother Goose Suite could almost be considered didactic in two directions, in that one could learn from inexperienced pianists the potential for expressiveness of ``non-expressive'' playing technique.

The first of Debussy's Etudes distances itself from pedagogy with the rhythmic and harmonic pranks it plays on the Czerny five-finger exercise. In literature, Queneau's Exercises de Style shows what happens when an anecdote is told ninety-nine times, each time with a distinct rhetorical or narrative style. One would not study this work in order to master the ninety-nine styles; rather one would study the composition of its way of calling into question the importance of plot to narration.

Brecht's lehrstücke are examples of compositions which show alternatives and criteria. Brecht attempted in these ``teaching pieces'' to show an unresolved dilemma in a context of descriptions of the dilemma which could make it appear as a solvable problem.

Brecht, after all ... wished not to dispense words of wisdom and pithy slogans, but to activate thought processes in the audience ... Brecht's attempts to kill subjective nuances with the aid of a blunt instrument, and to do so conceptually as well, are technical means of his art. In his best works, they are a principle of stylization, far removed from any pedagogical fabula docet [the story teaches].
(Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 47)

There exist pieces about which it is said that their form or structure is ``open''.

Usage varies.

Some have used the term in the attempt to distinguish compositional experiments in variability of form.

``Aleatorio can be played several times in succession, provided that the interpreters change the character of particular parts ... These possibilities for change are not chance--they present only a field of possibilities--and ask of the interpreters to make an arrangement of them. Aleatorio is an open composition...''
(Evangelisti, performance notes for Aleatorio)

``For many listeners one of the clear experiences of a score of this kind ... [is that] there is a definite perception that this structure is only one of a constellation of possible structures.''
(Fuller, 187)

``This search for `suggestiveness' is a deliberate move to `open' the work to the free response of the addressee.''
(Eco, The Role of the Reader, 53)

``Today's artists would rather do away with unity altogether, producing open, unfinished works, or so they think. The problem is that in planning openness they necessarily impart another kind of unity unbeknown to themselves.''
(Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 204))

Some have responded to the fact that many of the descriptions which purport to distinguish open works apply to other works as well. Two strategies are adopted in these responses. One strategy is to retain the distinction open/closed, and introduce a new formulation of the distinction.

``For musicians the term `open structure' has curious and rather limiting connotations. It has been associated almost exclusively with various random procedures of composition, the use of which may, in fact, just as readily yield a closed structure as an open one. In its most characteristic manifestation, the open work seems to be one in which perception replaces object. In other words, the focus of the open composition seems to be not so much upon the object of perception but rather upon the process of perception ... form becomes a model of the self as it first encounters the world ...''
(Delio, Circumscribing the Open Universe, 2)

``What I call open texts, are, rather, reducing ... indeterminacy, whereas closed texts, even though aiming at eliciting a sort of `obedient' cooperation, are in the last analysis randomly open to every pragmatic accident.''
(Eco 7))

``The sonata movement of Viennese classicism was a closed form despite its dynamic quality, and no matter how precarious the closure might have been. By contrast, the rondo, with its deliberate vagueness and oscillation between refrain and `couplets', is a decidedly open form.''
(Adorno Aesthetic Theory, 314))

The other strategy is to is to admit that all works are open, and retain the distinction as one of degree rather than kind.

What you [G. M. Koenig] said now about the score--in some sense all scores are open. I would subscribe to it completely. It's a question of degree then. Something like Variations II or Variations I of Cage is open in a way that Debussy's Jeux is not. And yet both of them are still open in the sense that they're waiting for some kind of realization which we know will vary depending on who does it, how they interpret it and so forth. So there's always some margin of openness in any text before it is rendered into sound.''
(Christian Wolff, quoted in Fuller, panel discusssion)

``So called open texts are only the extreme and most provocative exploitation--for poetic purposes--of a principle which rules both the generation and the interpretation of texts in general.''
(Eco)

``Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance.''
(Eco)

``A work of art therefore, is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity. Hence, every reception of a work of art is both an interpretations and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself.''
(Eco)

The controversy over when to call a work `open' and `indeterminate' has survived several versions of an answer which should have settled it.
(Eco, Brün)

``Every score is determinate and specific in that it defines the finite set of questions to which it offers answers.''
(Brün, My Words and Where I Want Them)

open form, open structure,
open ended,
open society,
open book,
open classroom,
opening,
gala opening,
opening to democracy,
open door, open air, open field,
open spaces,
open-and-shut case,
open mind,
open face,
open heart, open person, open wound:
the word `open' has a rich contextual history.

There exist pieces about which it is said that the openness of their forms links them to didactic purposes.

``This music is drawn from the interaction of the people playing it. It requires for its performance independent self-discipline (unpoliced by a score defining fixed relationships and timings) and a capacity and special alertness for responding to what one's fellow performers are doing, the sounds they are making or changing and their silences. The responding can be variously deliberate (there is time and you are free) or must be quick and sudden (there are precise requirements which appear unpredictably)...In the meantime others pointed out the pedagogical character of this activity and some social implications (for instance, a kind of democratic interdependence).''

(Wolff, liner notes the Opus One recording of For 1, 2, or 3 People by the Percussion Group of Cincinnati)

``The one merit of such a purely formal score [Cage's Variations I] is that it releases the initiative of the performer--it gives participation in the act of composition and hence a genuinely educative experience.''
(Cardew 37)

`` ... the score and its requirements for making this music is such that anyone seriously wishing to, whether or not musically trained or professional, can read and use it; the music might be an incentive to do that, that is, to make of listeners performers.''
(Wolff)

``Brecht's plays also end in a situation of ambiguity ... the specific concreteness of an ambiguity in social intercourse, a conflict of unresolved problems taxing the ingenuity of the playwright, actors and audience alike. Here the work is `open' in the same sense that a debate is `open'. A solution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated, but it must come from the collective enterprise of the audience. In this case the `openness' is converted into an instrument of revolutionary pedagogics.''
(Eco 55)

The `open form' score offers alternatives; the performer must appoint the criteria--however the manner in which the open-form work offers alternatives may invite the performer to draw distinctions which could then become criteria.

An exception is Cage's Variations II, which asks that the performer put those questions which may arise into a form such that they can be answered by the `score' (measurements of the distances of five points to six lines). This instruction would indicate that the score provides a sort of generalized set of criteria (an oracle) for choosing among alternatives which the performer must generate.

The difference between a row and an oracle is the placement of artifice.

Boulez promotes the idea of the deliberately self-taught composer.
From whom does the self-taught composer learn?
From himself. Herself.
From what does the self-taught composer learn?
From compositions.
Under what circumstances would one learn from a composition?
When one asks it questions.
Is that all?
When the composition offers alternatives.
And?
And criteria.

The ability of an audience member to elevate the mere existence of hearing to a level of listening, must come from a desire to do so. If composers prefer an audience educated to listen, composers must assist in that educational process by composing works which help bridge the gap between hearing and listening. It seems self-evident that a significant percentage of music does not promote listening at all.
(Udow)

Every composition bridges a gap between some hearing and its listening. A composition can help teachers who are capable of listening to raise the desire of students for the listening which that composition promotes. A composer would assist this process by composing works which offer a gap to be bridged.

(A distinction between hearing and listening: the listener's awareness of what the listener's language does to what is heard.)

``An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one. What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.''
(Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, 233)

One learns from the `closedness' of a good composition. One observes how its ambiguities are pinned down on both sides by consistencies. One observes how that which we know from inherited aesthetics to be wrong, bad, risky, tasteless, ugly, weak, unheard-of is nested in such a context as makes it a necessary consequence of a quasi-axiomatic construction.

The difference between the composer as teacher and the composition as teacher is that the composer begins with the power of a respondent; the composition begins bereft of this power--which it acquires only through an `as-if': it is treated as if it had the power of response by its respondent.

If a composition is new and experimental, it is possible that the performer of such a piece undertakes actions the significance of which the performer does not yet know.

Is the composition then to be thought of as incapable of showing? No, but the composition, in order to realize its potential for showing, relies on the presence of someone speaking up for it: a respondent.

The desire to open possibilities is haunted by the tendency to exhaust all possibilities. The opening of possibilities risks usurping possibilities; thus `openness' and `exhaustive' must be faked in order to function as pointer rather than as usurper.

What von Foerster says about the concept of information reflected in the use of `audio-visual aids' in teaching could also apply to the presentation of a composition, for pedagogical purposes or not.

We only have to perceive lectures, books, slides and films, etc., not as information but as vehicles for potential information. Then we shall see that in giving lectures, writing books, showing slides and films, etc., we have not solved a problem, we just created one, namely, to find in which context can these things be seen so that they create in their perceivers new insights, thoughts, and actions.
(von Foerster, ``The Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception'', 91)

Obedience

The performers who have decided to perform a piece which explicitly asks them to take initiative and make decisions do what they are told. One shouldn't be surprised if the conscientious performers, having been told to take initiative and make decisions, attempt to second-guess the decisions the composer would have made.

Let's go back to Variations I (1958) which I regard as a key work in Cage's output. Unlike Cheap Imitation, the score of Variations I emphasizes the total interdependence of all the attributes of sound. Transparent sheets of lines and dots make up the score. The dots (sound events) are read in relation to a number of lines representing various aspects of sounds ... The one merit of such a purely formal score is that it releases the initiative of the performer--it gives participation in the act of composition and hence a genuinely educative experience. In the balance on the other side is the total indifference (implicitly represented by such a formalistic score) to the seriousness of the world situation in which it occurs. Can that one merit tip the scales?
(Cardew, 37)

The gesture with which an assignment is given prompts the respondent in the way to receive the assignment. (The respondent, though, retains the power to follow the prompting or not.) Many works which have made explicit that they are giving an assignment to the performer, do so by attaching the word `any'. Though `any' seems at first to be a generous offer; soon the absence of constraint or preference can be detected to represent a withholding of potential criteria, and a withdrawal from dialogue by the dialogue partner. An astronomical number of alternatives with few limiting criteria brings on paralysis or obedience. The history of new, experimental compositions that have been treated by performers with resentful obedience is well known. Under what circumstances would I say that the piece elicited resentful obedience?

The reason for that multiplicity is that you would not then be able to exercise choice. If you're making eighty-eight loops, very quickly you get uninterested in what it is you are doing.
(John Cage, quoted in Kostelanetz, 118)

The mix of instruction and orientation peculiar to a score, meeting the requirements for mix of instruction and orientation peculiar to a player, determines, in part, the kind of initiative the score is able to elicit.

Some would say that that was a lot of trouble to go through just to get at some cookies. And it was. Others would say that that was just some trick to take up space with something other than cookies. And it probably was. Yet others would say that I was the very sucker for which that was designed. And I am. There is another view. I see the care with which the packaging was done as an invitation to enjoy what I found there, to take this perhaps first chance the whole day to unravel something, to speculate on the kind of person who might have designed that packaging of those contents, to do almost anything but gobble up the contents
(Harlock, 2)

I can imagine a context in which to utter the word `any' has a liberating effect, and I can imagine a context in which to utter the word `any' discourages, disappoints, provokes resentment. It is hoped that a performer of a score which uses the word `any' feels called upon to compose, in that it is up to the performer to create the context wherein the word `any' has a liberating effect, since the composer did not.

If I emphasize `you may', I point to a backdrop of expectations which assumes `you may not' (I dare not?).

Eco shows the corollary, that works which aim at ``eliciting a sort of `obedient' cooperation'', which he refers to as `closed', are the ones most `open' to interpretation.

Open form scores rarely distinguish between instruction, invitation, and assignment.

Open-form orchestral works show the current contradiction between the concert situation and the teaching situation in that these works require the technical accomplishment of a top-notch professional orchestra whose members have the spirit of adventure of a group of students.

A Composition's Assignment

The openness of a work of art can be taken by a respondent as that work's assignment.

The pieces composed under the assignment: Open form! began to make explicit the possibility that a work of art (with its degree and kind of openness) could be accepted by its respondents as an assignment. Its respondents (listener and performer) are asked to imaginatively reconstruct the alternatives from which the composer chose and the criteria consulted while choosing. The respondent might in some cases possess more than one imaginative reconstruction, and thus be able to exercise choice of interpretation.

A composition's assignment to a listener is different from the composition's assignment to a performer insofar as listener and performer exist in differing situations in which to try out their constructions.

The idea of versions relies on hearing the varied against the repeat: varied repeat. The first condition of significant alteration is the declaration by the `altered' of its antecedent (though error, doubt, change of mind, illusion may be involved in the declaration).

That which Evangelisti asks explicitly of the players of Aleatorio for string quartet--that they agree on a version among the numerous possible versions, and that if the piece is done more than once on a program, each performance should be a distinct version--this is an assignment ideally given by every piece. Chamber music poses problems of group decision-making. What distinguishes a piece in this respect is its degrees and kinds of variability. In the case of Aleatorio, for instance, the assortment of alternate playing techniques and ossiae provide tools with which to tackle one of the main problems posed by the piece: the problem of giving a distinct ``character'' to each of the three sections.

``In other words the author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed.''
(Eco 62)

The respondent who takes up an assignment may be interested in the assignment for reasons other than those of the respondent who gave the assignment.

When does the assignment given by a work require composition to fulfill it?
(When is an assignment a composition assignment?)

Desired Consequences II

Occasionally one hears musicians report about the rehearsing of a piece in which they had no initial interest that they were beginning to ``hear things'', which they hadn't expected to find in the piece. Such reports hint at the significance of the situation of rehearsal for the possibility of letting a composition have a function akin to teaching. The tradition of open rehearsal retains a promise of the bridging of the gap between the concert situation and the teaching situation.

Missing from both the musician's rehearsal and the listener's rehearsal is a forum for speaking about the perceptions and connections which the rehearsal situation made possible. Conversation--as yet--rarely invites pursuing in detail what were the ``things'' that the musician took such pleasure in hearing.

``To compose, at least by propensity, is to give to do, not to give to hear but to give to write. The modern location for music is not the concert hall, but the stage on which the musicians pass, in what is often a dazzling display, from one source of sound to another. It is we who are playing, though still it is true by proxy; but one can imagine the concert--later on?--as exclusively a workshop ... where all the musical art is absorbed in a praxis ... Such is the utopia that a certain Beethoven, who is not played, teaches us to formulate--which is why it is possible now to feel in him a musician with a future.''
(Barthes, ``Musica Practica'')

The workshop-concert would have to have those aspects of a class that allow the sustaining of an environment of discourse, for instance the possibility of follow-up. The concert-workshop would differ from a lecture-demonstration in that, instead of reporting about the answering of a legitimate question, the workshop would invite the assembled participants to address legitimate questions.

SP How does this fit--witness and now dismissal--into teaching composition? I've been evading ... You have the composition of teaching. When people ask `How can you teach young students composition? Don't you brainwash them? You tell them your style?' That's what my father said, `How do, you know, how does one guy teach another person how to be creative?' It seems like it's, you know, a fallacy.

LO It seems similar to problems we've talked about in relation to designing society which is that if you stipulate the structure under which something is going to take place, take shape, have existence, then you will prevent exactly that which you want to have happen, which is a living, growing, and changing-itself, designing-itself society. And so the difficulty is to raise the awareness of the problems and of how to solve problems I think on the level of, in that particular area of designing society and in teaching composition.

SP Mm hm, good point.

LO This doesn't answer what you brought up which is ... connects ...

SP Well, it does bring up this notion of self-organizing, self-designing. What would you have to teach, or how would we speak of teaching such that it doesn't take out the very vital thing which is the person wants to self-organize, self-design, self-compose.

``The Song of Art'' and ``The Nest of the Song'' (1979), two titles for one experiment designed and instigated by Patrick Daugherty (in collaboration with many others), made a contribution to the idea of composing a process of eliciting. The structure of the experiment was as follows. ``The Song of Art'' (``an interaction between the work of artists and the work of other community groups'') consisted of two events: (1) a workshop to which some twenty artists and representatives from some twenty community advocacy groups were invited, and (2) a concert the next evening. The group representatives were asked to prepare for the workshop by writing a statement of the ``desired consequences'' of the group's activity. At the workshop, the statements were read, and then the representatives of each group wrote a statement of the desired consequences of a piece which they had never seen or heard, and would have liked to. The statements were then taken by the artists as points of departure for the composition of pieces to be presented two months later. The next evening after the workshop was a concert of compositions of music and theater by Daugherty, interspersed with readings of statements of the desired consequences of each piece written by the participating artists; the concert was open to the public.

``The Nest of the Song'' was the name given to the follow-up event two months later. During that time the artists had composed and rehearsed pieces filling three programs--performed at the public library and two community centers--keeping in mind the descriptions of desired consequences written by the community group representatives.

The didactic intention of the project was to have the term `desired consequence' enter the vocabularies of the participants, so that: one would have an alternative to `goal' and `activity', and, as I now say, the friction generated by the networks of connections of composers and activists working under one proposal would elicit a change of image from both.