Liner Notes

A composer's response to Eddie Prévost's Entelechy

Here is Eddie's description of how the title track of this CD came about:

'[Entelechy] is virtually autonomous. The tam-tam was suspended upon its usual rectangular frame. In this instance a battery driven electric motor was set up alongside the tam-tam with wire threads fanning out from a small rotating wheel. I set this in motion and retired to the control room to watch and listen with the recording engineer (Sebastian Lexer) as the tam-tam (as it were) told its own story. Various processes came into play. The fanning wires beat the edge of the tam-tam and began to set up numerous overtone patterns — due in part to the irregular shape of the wheel motion. These were enhanced, diverted and changed by a gradual oscillating motion as the rotating beaters began to push the tam-tam on its suspending rope (creating a gentle swinging movement), and by the gradual diminishing power of the motor. This process was played out until the batteries were depleted.'

As a composer, I am struck by the similarities that this approach has to certain experimental tendencies in the world of composition. Various pieces spring to mind that are concerned with setting up a physical situation and then allowing it to play itself out, with no more than a gentle nudge from the performer. Steve Reich's Pendulum Music, Takehisa Kosugi's Micro 1 and Alvin Lucier's Music on a Long Thin Wire are all works concerned with revealing the potentiality of materials and allowing those materials to sound themselves, where, after initiating the process, the performer steps back and listens with the rest of the audience.

Since traditional Western notation (notes on staves) is often inadequate for articulating ideas such as these, the text or prose score has developed, where the process of the music is practically described in written language, but specific details about the resulting sounds are left unwritten. Intriguingly, if you change the tense of Prévost's text from past to present it reads much like one of the prose scores of, say, Alvin Lucier, 'The tam-tam is suspended upon its usual rectangular frame. A battery driven electric motor is set up ...'.

The commonly held notion of a musical score as a set of commands to be unquestioningly obeyed by a performer is misleading. For me, a score is a starting place, an invitation or suggestion for action, a proposal for collaboration between sympathetic minds. And with this comes extraordinary potentiality — just think of LaMonte Young's Draw a straight line and follow it. Scores like this, often easily memorisable, are suggestions for activity, propositions for listening and observation. Realisations of these pieces can also be discovered as already occurring in everyday life, irrespective of the existence of a performer — and here the discovery on the part of the listener becomes the creative act. Young's butterfly piece, for instance, where the performance is over when the butterfly leaves the room through an open window, may be one of his most performed works. George Brecht's Drip Music is always happening somewhere nearby, and in London you are never more than 20 ft away from a Missing-Letter Sign.

Of all the sound-producing instruments, the tam-tam has probably been the one most resistant to traditional forms of notation. In Western music it has commonly been used either to provide an amorphous and ambiguous wash of sound or to herald the arrival of a genie. Nevertheless, a few experimental works have recently been conceived which engage head-on with the instrument's complex and richly unpredictable nature. A glowing example is James Tenney's Having Never Written a Note for Percussion. I asked some friends for descriptions of this piece, and they used phrases like 'rainbow of sound' and 'resonance inertia'. This tiny score, written on a postcard (though it would fit on a stamp), gives the performer simple guidelines (essentially quiet to loud to quiet) within which to explore an instrument and allow it to reveal its inner workings to the listener. The score encapsulates the guiding principle by which the piece is realised, and at the same time renders every performance unique through purposeful omissions and ambiguities within these guidelines. In the case of Eddie Prévost's CD, the last recording you will hear is a document of a single live situation ('entelechy' means 'actuality' according to Chambers). However, one could consider it as a document of one realisation from an infinite number of potential realisations, each with its own overtone content and timbres, each with its own duration (it could last for days) and each to be experienced in a live public setting.

For each track on this CD, Eddie has limited himself to using particular methods to activate the gong (as indicated by the titles). I find connections with aspects of composition here too, through the use of constraint. Limitations placed on the working process have of course been present in composition for centuries. And there are good reasons for this. Constraint offers resistance, the opportunity for a heightened dialogue with the materials at hand, or as the OuLiPo's Marcel Bénabou writes, '... it forces the system out of its routine functioning thereby compelling it to reveal its hidden resources'.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word 'entelechy' as 'The supposed vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system of organisation', with reference to Aristotle and the Vitalists. In composed music, a score is that guiding principle, but to me, whether this principle exists as a notated score or as an idea in the improviser's mind is irrelevant. There is a discernible area of music concerned with actively finding and revealing hidden resources of the materials at hand, and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines are converging on this common ground, where the previously clear boundaries of composition and improvisation lose their definition: Sean Meehan (drummer), the late Stuart Marshall (composer and film-maker), Alan Lamb (biological scientist) ...

Regarding his playing on this recording, Eddie writes, 'It is a direct investigative interaction of musician with the materials at hand. Of course there are some anticipations and expectations. Few (if any) musicians manage to create something completely new. However there is, in any exploration, the possibility of something seeming accidental occurring. And, it is an openness to this prospect that marks the experimental improvising musician.'

On reading this, I was reminded of another text about music, this one by a composer. The following passage is from Igor Stravinsky's Poetics of Music:
'In the course of my labors I suddenly stumble upon something unexpected. This unexpected element strikes me. I make a note of it. At the proper time I put it to profitable use. This gift of chance must not be confused with that capriciousness of imagination that is commonly called fancy. Fancy implies a predetermined will to abandon one's self to caprice. The aforementioned assistance of the unexpected is something quite different. It is a collaboration which is immanently bound up with the creative process and is heavy with possibilities which are unsolicited and come most appositely to temper the inevitable over-rigourousness of the naked will. And it is good that this is so.'

John Lely
February 2006

Further reading:

Marcel Bénabou ˜Rule and Constraint' (from Oulipo, a Primer for Potential Literature, Dalkey Archive 1998)
Gilbert K. Chesterton Complete Father Brown (Penguin Books 1986)
Igor Stravinsky Poetics of Music (Harvard 1942)