Music as exploration

A friend of mine recently showed me this piece of music and I thought it was really interesting, So this post will be a few thoughts I had after listening to it a few times.

First let me start off by saying I absolutely love this piece of music. It’s a bit strange sounding and kind of avant-garde, but I really like the story it tells about music, or at least the story I tell myself that it tells about music … that probably didn’t make any sense.

The main thing I hear when I listen to this is an exploration. At the time that György Ligeti wrote this (1958) electronic instruments were fairly new. They hadn’t been used in a whole lot and the Moog synthesizer hadn’t even been created yet (it was released in 1962). So this piece is quite literally exploring how electronics can be used to create different audio and musical sounds.

I also hear an exploration of what it means for a piece of art to be music. This piece of music isn’t music in the traditional sense of music with a meter and pitches notated on paper and acoustic instruments and harmonies and triads. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t music. It’s still music.

It’s exploring the different sounds that can be created and programmed using synthesizers. It’s also exploring rhythm in the sense that it’s using rhythms that aren’t metered how most rhythms in music are; metered rhythms are rhythms that are dividing time into even chunks. Un-metered rhythms do not divide up time into even chunks.

If you’ve never written music like this it can be incredibly useful to practice doing to see just how much you can explore. I often decide an emotion or a feeling that I want to convey and try to convey that feeling while also exploring different aspects of music. This keeps me focused on something, conveying that emotion, to prevent me from just writing a bunch of random notes.

Another idea is to try to use one single motif as much as possible without it getting old or boring. See how many different ways you can vary one single motif to create as much music as possible.

ISJ