Penderecki, Contrast, and the Calculus of form:
In 2017 Krzystoph Penderecki came to Indiana University to receive an honorary doctorate and conduct his enormous piece, St. Luke Passion. I attended this concert and was supposed to meet Penderecki at a brunch led by the Polish Community Center at IU (one of my students was an IU law professor and was hosting it). Penderecki was unable to attend the brunch or to conduct his piece as was originally intended due to health concerns, however the piece was performed anyways with Penderecki in attendance, and the experience was highly impactful to my development as a composer and artist.
There were a few big takeaways, but before I dive into what I learned, I should mention that this post is not an analysis of St. Luke Passion itself. I’ve never even seen the score, and I’ve only listened to it one time - four years ago when I saw it live. It’s possible that subsequent listening and analysis would lead me to completely different thoughts from my initial reactions. This post is not about the piece itself, but about the experiences I had and the ideas I formed as a direct result of hearing it.
As I listened, I was at first surprised by the bold choices, intense moments of dissonance, and extreme levels of contrast. It was a pleasant surprise actually, because of IU’s notorious lack of emphasis on contemporary music (a problem shared by many elite conservatories nationwide). The piece explored the poles of possibilities; there were countless moments where I experienced “the most possible _______.” There were moments of the most dissonance possible and moments of the most possible consonance, moments of ppppp and of fffff, moments of tutti and moments of solo. It was my impression that when faced with any musical choice, Penderecki went with the most extreme, shocking, contrasting option available.
This is certainly not a criticism, nor is it unique to Penderecki; it can be said of many of his contemporaries across artistic mediums. Throughout the twentieth century the collective consciousness of society became more open to the idea that criteria that were once considered objective in art were actually just aspects of art that had a broad appeal to most people’s intuition (setting aside the fact that “most people” often referred exclusively to European aristocrats). So, waves of artists came along in each creative medium to prove that there are, in fact, no rules, no objective criteria, and Penderecki was among them.
So, as I listened to the piece, I experienced this lashing out against traditional forms and harmony. In many ways it felt like him saying “I can write ANYTHING! See??” and he celebrated this new freedom by making every subsequent musical moment as shocking and contrasting as possible.
However, throughout the course of the piece my experience gradually shifted. While I experienced the shocks of contrast at first, over time I came to understand that each subsequent musical moment would be the most shocking contrast possible to what we were currently hearing. Or in other words, I came to expect the unexpected, to expect the surprise itself.
This begs the philosophical question: If you expect the surprise, is it a surprise at all? This shift in my intuitive experience without a shift in the frequency of new contrasting sections absolutely fascinated me.
Composers traditionally think of contrast as a powerful tool for renewing attention. but, if the contrast itself happens consistently, then is it still contrast, or is it stagnant? Two adjacent sections might be contrasting, but in another sense the piece could be thought of as a completely consistent compilation of dozens of jarring 30-second sections.
And, in order to provide me an experience of surprise again (for example at the 45-minute mark of St. Luke Passion), the most shocking thing I could have heard would have been a lack of contrast. Or in other words, to sustain true surprise, a composer not only has to utilize contrast, but also has to utilize a contrast in the amount of contrast they use.
I eventually realized that contrast is, in essence, about rates of change. How quickly do you change from musical texture A to musical texture B, and how different are the two? I realized that there is already a group of people who have devoted their lives to understanding rates of change: people who study Calculus. This was an epiphany for me.
When I thought about St. Luke Passion in this light, I came to understand that the use of change itself was too consistent for my taste. And that if I wanted to compose or improvise my own music more thoughtfully, I would have to consider not only contrast, but the consistency of the amount of contrast that I use throughout the piece. I came to refer this idea as derivatives of form.
Since making this discovery I have integrated this idea into my musical practice in many small ways, but not yet in a single grand, sweeping, magnum-opus type way. My improvisations have definitely become more thoughtful with regards to the length of time that I develop single musical ideas before departing to the next one. And I’ve become more thoughtful as a composer with regards to form and contrast, making sure that the use of contrast isn’t an afterthought, but is a central point of creativity in each of my pieces from the beginning of the compositional process. Sometimes this manifests itself in an intuitive way: “all the sections I’ve written so far are about 16 bars long, so why not throw a long section in there.” Or, sometimes I’ll sit down and deliberately plan a piece with ideas about rates of contrast as the central creative theme. My String Quartet no. 1 is an exploration of every possible amount of vibrato, and all the ways to change vibrato over the course of a musical phrase.
Thinking about rates of contrast has made me think much harder about what aspects of music are available to make contrasts between in the first place. One long term project I have been casually working on for several years is an encyclopedia that catalogues every element of music that exists on a continuum (and therefore can employ contrast). For example, Volume exists on a continuum from silence to the loudest possible sound. Pitch exists on a continuum from the lowest audible sound to the highest audible sound. I began drawing these out with one pole on the left side of the page, and one on the right. And for every spectrum I came up with, I could add derivative spectra beneath it to alter it over time. This process looks like this:
Volume of a single musical moment:
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Absolute silence ; The loudest sound in the universe
Consistency of Volume
(throughout a phrase, or a few musical moments)
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Every moment is at an Identical decibel level ; volume is constantly changing
Consistency of the Consistency of Volume
(multiple phrases relative to each other)
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Adjacent phrases have identical consistencies of volume ; each phrase has a completely different volume contour
This way of thinking made me think of Yin and Yang: the idea of contrasting and complimentary forces that may seem like opposites, but are actually mutually dependent, inextricably and beautifully linked. There is no loud without soft to give us perspective, meaning loud and soft are in constant dialogue with one another much more so than say loud and hot, or loud and fast.
Exploring the extremes of these continuums leads naturally to conceptual art: working with the poles of duration I might write a symphony that that lasts a single millisecond, or I might write one that lasts 7-times longer than the total lifespan of the universe. But thinking about the extremes can also be an exercise that leads us to some insight about human intuition. Why are we less inclined to write songs that last six seconds than ones that last three minutes? And are all elements of contrast created equally? I can happily listen to Bach or Steve Reich for hours with little-to-no dynamic contrast, but I cannot imagine listening to a piece with zero contrast in pitch for hours. Which elements of contrast are necessary in music, if any?
Thinking about elements of contrast in the abstract can lead us down very fresh feeling creative paths. Why don’t I write a bunch of songs that last 6 seconds, and then put together a whole concert of them? Why are all the jazz songs I hear around 8 minutes long and feature four solos? What if I had a different number of solos on every song in a quartet concert, would that keep my attention more or less than what I usually hear? I’ve found real joy in tinkering with parameters like this. Thinking about contrast and the calculus of contrast has been my inexhaustible cure for writers block.
I have more to say on this topic, but since I’ve been working on this post for too long now, I’m going to just put it out there and say “to be continued.” As I’ve mentioned before in this blog I’m trying to keep the ideas flowing, not worry about 100% completion or academic standards of publishing, and just present ideas I’m excited about as honestly as I can. I hope you find them interesting or useful in your own artistic development.