Where Everything Converges: Total Organization of Music

But even when sounds are not concrete – don't directly correspond to some idea and life experience of ours – in contemporary music one often has an impression that melody more comes out of arrangement than the opposite. In some albums of JM Jarre and Vangelis this happens: melodies and harmonies of Oxygene, Equinoxe, Beaubourg or Heaven & Hell often sound uncannily like they came out from the texture itself; like melodies and harmonies are appearing almost casually, by condensing of arrangement, by amplifying the definition of arrangement. An example is opening theme of Bachanalle from Heaven And Hell of Vangelis, which is perfectly united with the vibe of the sound that plays it, where leading melody line is uncannily already contained within the timbre itself, melody squeezed out from the character of the timbre, that implicitly gives the hint of the melody. It’s like the melody is expressing the character of the timbre.

Where all of this leads is a therm more general than musique concrete: totally organized music.

It was not a case of first writing music and then searching for sounds, either from existing instruments or from experimenting with electronic means to produce new sounds. The timbres and musical structures all result from the application of the same compositional system. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen

The idea is to close the circle between all the elements of music. There should be a divine correlation between timbres and textures, chords and motives, so that it isn't clear anymore what comes first and what second; all parts to equally anticipate in the wholeness of construction. What we usually call arrangement, in total approach closely corresponds to melodic, harmonic and rhythmic content. The arrangement itself is highly structured, containing correlations similarly as it is the case with melodic and harmonic content. As Vangelis speaks:

What I want, even since my childhood, is to go beyond melody, to the totality of the sound. The vibration of sound itself contains melody, harmony and rhythm.

While abstract idea of music like this existed as we said throughout XX century, the actual attractive music that is close to this concept started to appear not before late 1960s, and especially during 1970s. I personally still wasn’t aware of what can artistically be done with such approach, despite hearing progressive rock electronica (Pink Floyd “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Sheep”), before I heard Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene and Equinoxe albums, and some orchestrations of Vangelis. This music was closer to the essence of “total organization” than any music I heard before. There was a divine co-relation between all the elements, which blend one into another, listener almost loosing awareness of what is what – harmony becomes texture, simple motives turn to melodies, rhythms to textures, textures to melody; Jarre’s pieces such as Oxygene 1, 5 or Equinoxe 2 are some examples; and in Zoolook album evolving vowels create theirs own kind of melodies, microtonal motions hiding musical structures; all parts come together in a unison sounding.

What further issues are different generalizations of melody, harmony and rhythm, not seen in traditional music. For example, melody does not apply only to series of pitches, but any horizontal evolution, so we can talk about melody of timbres. This phrase was already used around the beginning of XX century, among first modernist composers such as Arnold Schoenberg. What was particularly standing out here, was the connection between intonations of human speech and music. This relationship is deep and interested classical composers such as Janacek and Mussorgsky; they, as many today still, believed that all music was born from these basic speech-intonations. This results in strange “singing”, that is something between singing and speaking, like in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, that for the first time used “speech voice” and “speech song”, in which instead of singing in usual sense, speech patterns rise and fall. Jean Michel Jarre was the first to create a true striking piece in this manner, “Diva“ from “Zoolook” album from 1984. In this track Laurie Anderson sight-sings melody that is more a melody of timbres, more precisely of raw French-like speech-intonations, than of pitches (which are dissonant most of the way). Although sighs have no conscious meaning, they create an emotional impact and a sense of logical development, just like a melody – it is a true melody of intonations of human speech; musicalized intonations of speech, speech turned into music.

Generalization of harmony was equally prominent, especially at the place of JM Jarre. He was much into putting together different layers containing different things – melodies, harmonic progression, just bare sounds. A great example is Oxygene 2. On one layer there is a rhythm-less fast tune, on the other a descending harmonic motive, then a rhythmic bass beat and finally bullet-like sound effects. There is everything – pure melody, chord progression, rhythm, sounds, all looped. They come together in a harmony, creating an impression of a “hyper-chord”, “time-chord” -- it’s almost like a single tone; it sounds as all together going nowhere, but has the movement inside, as a kind of a time-chord. Mother of one friend of mine once entered his room while he was playing Oxygene 2 and asked him: “What is that horizontal music”? Layers that create this hyper-chord, although being melodies and harmonic progressions, actually have roles of single notes in an ordinary chord, like striking a C-minor but instead of notes, having melodic and harmonic loops. Or from the other side, it could be said that these cycling layers of music come together like harmonics in a timbre come together to form a single sound. But here this is elevated into whole abstract structure of music, like an imitation, an abstraction of superposition of harmonics within a timbre. So music in a way takes the logic of the sound itself on a more abstract level, becoming music -- as harmonics are cycling one on top of each other to create impression of a timbre, so melodic, harmonic, rhythmic loops are cycling to create an impression of a “hyper-chord”. This is probably what one lover of music, lamenting over the lack of interesting e-music recently, meant when he said: “Jarre could play a single note without boring you”.

Aural musicality

Totally organized music impacts peculiarly, bringing different, more transcendent and deep sort of musicality – we could call it aural musicality. Aural quality is that soulfully background quality, that is the very soul of electronic music, yet the most difficult to put to words. Term “ambient” refers more to melody-less background quality than to this. This is like whole music transformed into what is traditionally called texture, where melodicism shines through the whole structure, implicitly contained within. Music sounds as coming from some higher plane, only tickling our mind, like transcending usual musicality. Listener is receiving the unity of sound picture, the overall musical effect, rather than getting tied for particular layers. With aural listening, we allow ourselves to be impacted with atmosphere, and than follow relationships between elements that create the atmosphere, rather than follow motoric motions of individual elements, which is traditional score following. It is like watching from a distance, so we can see more.

When you look at a Van Gogh painting from a distance of 3 meters you see, let's say, red flowers. You are sure they're red flowers. But from 30 centimeters they're not red flowers at all, just a piece of red painting. Jean Michel Jarre

Listening is laid back in a sense of not following every single move inside the music, not tying our conscious attention for every of the details. In the same time, we understand and feel that these elements which escape our conscious attention are precisely articulated. A good example is again JM Jarre's “Arpeggiator” piece, with layers of arpeggios effortlessly coming together. We can precisely analyze its structure, of course, and see how it’s done, but that is not how we listen to it. These structures that overcome our consciousness and yet produce effect and the sense of articulation are among the high-peeks of modern music.