Some Discourse of Musique

Researcher: David Gorton

Of course, this is not a new idea. The creation of new music out of pre-existing music can be found throughout history, from the elaboration of plainchant melodies, the practice of arrangement, the concept of variation form, through to the intertextuality of post-modernism, and the wide-ranging examples of quotation and engagements with music of the past found in the works of many contemporary composers, each with their own reasons and methods of doing so. In his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music from 1907, Ferruccio Busoni presents a particularly idiosyncratic conception of the practice of transcription or arrangement, stating that every time music is written down, this notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract musical idea. Thus, the act of composing – of writing down – compels decisions to be made regarding instrumentation, sonority, and form, transforming the abstract into something more fixed. When an arranger makes a subsequent arrangement, this step is, in Busoni’s words, comparatively short and unimportant. An aim of this project has been to find ways to explore the liminal space suggested by Busoni’s concept: a space that might be found between the practices of composition and arrangement.

The compositional techniques that underpin the interventions of the project can be classified into the following broad categories. First, a vertical layering of one borrowed material upon another, so that multiple sources are heard simultaneously, creating an increase in density and dissonant, unusual harmonies. At times, this density can be controlled and counterbalanced by the subsequent removal of material to thin the textures, leaving behind incomplete layers. Alternatively, the removal of material can be carried out to the extent that only a dissonant skeleton of the original remains. Second, a horizontal stitching together of fragments of material to create a new musical continuity and structure. For example, where the end of a phrase from one piece resembles the start of a phrase from another, the two can be joined together to create one long phrase. Or existing materials can be reorganised into musical structures that are alien to them. Third, the introduction of new materials that change the contexts and characters of originals, such as different metres, harmonies, melodic lines, or microtonal tunings.

By applying these techniques to historical sources, this project pursues the idea of creating music that is overtly about other music. Through the selection and weaving together of existing music it is possible to isolate and highlight particular musical characteristics of the originals by placing them within new contexts. The act of composition can thus become a critical apparatus that affords a discursive relationship between historical models and contemporary practice. The various compositions in the project draw upon borrowed materials from the long seventeenth century, and are also, in their own ways, about that music. This ranges from Elizabethan keyboard music, through consort music from either side of the English Civil War, and through to the development of the concerto form at the end of the century.

Music from the long seventeenth century makes an interesting resource for this project because of the difficulty in approaching it without viewing it through the lens of what came next. This renders music from this period simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. While, on the one hand, there are the beginnings of forms and technical models that are familiar in the repertoire of the following centuries, there are also musical redundancies and dead ends, stages of historical development that are then abandoned, or approaches to line and dissonance that feel idiosyncratic or quirky. The word uncanny is often used to describe things that are both familiar and strange at the same time. The ecologist Timothy Morton uses the term to describe our emotional responses to the spheres of ethics, politics, ecological thinking, and art appreciation, observing that the experience of the uncanny includes the ambiguity of how things can appear to oscillate between the familiar and the strange.

The development of an aesthetic of the uncanny is of central importance to this project and relates to both the source materials and the compositional interventions imposed upon them. But the word uncanny could also be applied to the performance practice of these compositions. For example, the score of Farnabye’s Maske states that it should be played as if it is a piece of early seventeenth-century English keyboard music. Yet it is clearly not that, and is written for the piano, an instrument that significantly postdates the objective of the instruction, and which has its own highly developed set of technical and interpretational contexts. Historically-informed performance practice is both evoked and revoked. Yet the compositions of the project do encourage an engagement with historical dance forms, contrapuntal lines, and ornamentation, along with a modern sensibility for the voicing and balance of dense harmonies. And so, these pieces encourage in their performers an ownership and interpretational management of the uncanny.

Image: Lyveden New Beild in Northamptonshire, an Elizabethan lodge that was left incomplete when the owner died in 1605.

Text abridged and adapted from David Gorton’s inaugural lecture as a Professor of the University of London, 24 January 2023.