I just finished listening to the premiere performance of Pamela Z’s “Simultaneous,” conceived for radio broadcast this afternoon and presented by Deutschlandradio. Unless I am mistaken, the Web site for the Deutschlandfunk Kultur program series has created a Web page for revisiting this program. The composition itself is about 45 minutes in duration, and the broadcast was preceded by introductory material that lasted a little over five minutes. The announcer spoke in German but played recordings of Z providing background material in English.
Hopefully, this Web page will remain accessible for a while. There is too much in this elaborately sophisticated approach to tape music to be digested in a single listening experience, and the creation is far too imaginative to be deprived of such a digestive process! While it may seem a bit unfair to evoke the tired cliché “It is what it is,” that is precisely what “Simultaneous” “is.” The recording was created to explore the nature of simultaneity, and Z’s explorations were “documented” through the creation of simultaneities to be experienced by the listener.
I was easily drawn into both Z’s objective and her approach to realizing that objective due to my own interest in the nature of simultaneity as it underlies experiences of listening to music. Back when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-Seventies, I worked with two colleagues, one of whom was particularly interested in the approaches that Heinrich Schenker took to the analysis of musical compositions. Schenker deployed an almost impenetrable graphic notation to represent his analyses. My colleagues and I realized that Schenker’s analyses could be represented more clearly in terms of the fundamental data structures behind the LISP programming language.
The basic idea was that a list is a linear ordering of symbols. Those symbols may be “atomic” (i.e. a representation of a single item); but other symbols in the ordering may, themselves, be lists. Thus more elaborate symbols would basically be tree-like structures of lists within lists. My colleague familiar with Schenker’s techniques then proposed that there were two types of lists. One type of list amounted to a sequential ordering of the symbols in the list, and the other represented a simultaneity of those symbols. The latter amounted to a “chord” of notes or a “polyphony” of voices; and Schenker wished to approach any tonal composition as an “unfolding” of a chord based on the perfect fifth and major third encountered in the harmonic series. Thus, a simultaneity could be “unfolded” into sequences that would then express the simultaneity as a melodic line.
While this proved to be a useful data structure for Schenker’s notation, it raised a problematic chicken-and-egg question: When is a sequence an “unfolding” of a simultaneity; and when does a simultaneity “overlay” two or more sequences? This amounts to a chicken-and-egg problem that was not adequately addressed by either Schenkerian analysis or the LISP data structures that my team and I concocted.
At the “highest level,” Z’s creation is sequential in nature. Events unfold over the course of the composition’s 45-minute duration. However, most of those events involve simultaneities; and many of them involve simultaneities of other sequences. Unless i am mistaken, some of those “other sequences” consist, in turn, of simultaneities, meaning that the composition “Simultaneous” amounts to a rabbit hole in which mind falls as it tries to sort out the sequences embedded in the simultaneities. So it is that I appreciate the fact that Deutschlandfunk Kultur has provided an opportunity for me to revisit Z’s composition as part of an ongoing effort to sort out sequences and simultaneities.
Needless to say, one does not have to approach Z’s creation with such complex analysis in mind. The events in her composition unfold with a clarity through which one easily recognizes where the simultaneities reside. At the very least, one comes away recognizing that there are a prodigious number of ways in which simultaneity may be experienced. The diversity of those experiences is at the core of Z’s composition, which never obliges the listen to analyses of classification. For each of the episodes in her music, one can manage quite well by simply appreciating the different kinds of simultaneity she is exploring over the course of the entire composition.
From that point of view, the 45 minutes occupied by the music are likely to pass far more rapidly than the attentive listener might expect.
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