On Character of Universal Music

Something can be said about inherent peculiarities of music written as universal music. As can be seen by looking at actually produced electronic music until now, it generally has somewhat different character to it than what was composed with performance in mind. It is more “precise”. Sound recordings themselves, the fact that people got used to music addressing them immediately from the devices, caused musicians to tend to create more melodic, better structured music, ideas more condensed. Sometimes this is referred to as “scientific”, “mathematical” character. This character is the direct outcome of focusing on what is mentally engaging, so musical logic becomes emphasized.

Precision in composing was in the past associated before all with traditional classical music. Classical composers were examples of perfect articulation and organization, precision-writing -- for example Bach. This character is also what all XX century experimentators longed for. Anti-romanticism of XX century musical elite was much about this, glorifying of ratio. Pieces written for synthesizers during 1970s, while not being so evolved and sophisticated as classical, had the most “mathematical” sounding in music ever, although authors actually not being theoretically minded nor openly talking about these qualities. Melody became of a very mental kind, a mentally fuller kind of melody, in which every note stings the mind of a listener and melodies burn themselves into the memory (Jean Michel Jarre’s pieces are especially known for this effect).

It was an idea since always that music is connected with the mind -- “music is mathematics” as old Greeks said it. Yet traditional music is always erected from a performance. What this leads towards, is that it is largely based on instinctive motoric clichés. They are not very stimulating to our mind and are heard half-consciously. They don’t carry much thought inside. Presence of these instinctive motoric clichés makes music sound less mentally engaging, having a trivial, predictable type of flow. Classical, ethnic, jazz music is full of these motoric, instinctive clichés. Traditional composing is a mixture of these motoric atoms and decisions that composer makes. In electronic music, motoric atoms are eliminated and decision-making is everything that is heard - that is, instead of motoric atoms, the building elements of music are the basic musical elements - individual notes, sounds etc. Composition is stripped-down on bare structure. There is much weight on every single element. Mike Oldfield maybe best expressed this when he said:

The mark of a good musician is - when he strikes a single note, he really means it.

These pieces are difficult to compose as theirs structure is delicate, every next move must be well judged. This is often associated with so-called minimalism, which however focuses on repetition and small number of details, rather than on the essence of which we are speaking about. If we say that music is more science than art, or even if we say that music is meta-science, science before all other sciences -- as Vangelis believes, we are probably not wrong. In electronic music musical exactness is of uttermost importance. Sense of abstraction and structured reasoning is essential. Originality is emphasized, since being deprived of instinctive motoric clichés of bodily driven music, these pieces are by definition stripped-down to pure idea, and therefore require a strong basic idea. However, in the same time it’s not easy to avoid sounding basic, static and obvious.

In order to compose like this, often there is even a need to over-ride inherited musical instincts and think of something “unnatural”, yet sensible. What also ensues is that these pieces tend to have more “pointed-out” structure – music as interaction of notes that stand separately, creating an impression of “note tattoo” rather than a flowing river, which is close to ideas about music of romantic period. This pointed-out style, melody as a series of discreet happenings, appears because our minds are discreet rather than continuous, so music that address it is also like that. It is easy to recognize this signature, in almost all “electronic” pieces; JM Jarre’s famous Oxygene 2 central arpeggio, “Cascade” single from Future Sound Of London etc., or in a less degree in pulsating tunes of London group Art Of Noise, such as “Moments In Love”. Another example is again JM Jarre’s hit Oxygene 4 (varied from “pop-corn” tune of Kingsley). Another example is Axel F. of Jan Hammer. Later I discovered that Stockhausen was writing in his time about this, and called it ‘punktual’ music. I personally first stumbled on the phrase “pointed-out style” while reading on one place about Stravinsky.

Another phrase which we will use to refer to a feature of electronic music I also encountered is associated with another classical composer, Anton Webern. His music is said to be the first that clearly functioned through “dichotomy of sound and silence”. Silence was part of rhythmic patterns. This is practically a feature of pointed-out style, which by nature emphasizes the “the space between the two notes”; notes “break the silence”, rather than flow from previous sound. Listener is never lulled in fluid developments, never carried by “smooth” feeling, but left to expect logical yet surprising next decisions of a composer. Every next decision, every next presentation of a new idea – be it a chord, a note, a new layer of sound, a new rhythmic twist – is emphasized, by emphasized periods of non-happening between them; music is seen as a series of happenings clearly distinguished one from another with periods of non-happening, stagnation. A listener is left with the time to completely absorb already presented material before receiving continuation. Composer then presents the next idea as a “solution”, unexpected but natural next element that should both surprise and mesmerize the listener. We are in a state of active ”expectation” of a composition, “floating” in what is already said and expecting of what is to be said. So the musical logic is emphasized by both the sudden, edgy and surprising way on which the sound arrives when it comes, and the silence and the stagnation in-between. It is a development of great contrast; either nothing is happening, either suddenly much is happening. “Between the notes” can be just nothing happening, or already presented ideas repeat in a cycle, and often there is the rhythmic background layer to compensate for the lack of happenings in-between the presentation of new elements. Every move is short and sudden, while non-happening is long and static.

There is also a hidden rhythmic potential here. By rhythmic, what we actually usually mean, is sudden outburst. In pointed-out style, every next move of the composer tends to “hit” the listener, it is a kind of progression with “the strike”, where every next move of a composer hits like a hit of a drum; those sudden outburst are essentially rhythmic in impact. But those are not outbursts of loud sounds, like in rock or pop music, but outbursts of logic; the “blow”, the “sting”, is achieved through smart developments; what makes edginess is not level of amplitude, or texture, but rather the power with which the element swings our mind in some completely new direction. In the same time, while being sudden and unpredictable, every next move is adding to the music, going further, making music ever more logical, resulting in overwhelm of logic, similar as noisy rock and jazz drum sessions result in orgiastic “drive” of bodily rhythm. Pointed-out music can be thus called some sort of “rock on brain” (some journalist did actually invent the phrase “math rock”). In classical music, mostly baroque, and somewhat classicist, is of this kind.

Probably the best example of this very pointed out, sound-and-silence kind of melody can be seen in JM Jarre’s Ethnicolor I. It is played buy a “tsut” digitalized voice; stinging a mind of a listener listener like a needle, each note comes as from somewhere else to break the “silence between the notes”, impregnated by chords and textures, and then leaves listener in an empty space waiting for the next note; like drops of watter falling in a pool causing tremblings on the membrane of chords and textures (main melody line is probably varied from Vangelis Antarctica theme, that in a less measure has the same character). JM Jarre himself often spoke about his idea of music being as much about the silence between the notes as about the notes themselves.