Music By Chance

I was going to write about another escapade of mine today, but I'm a little busy looking for napkins to clean my exploded brain mess that's all over the floor.

I'm sure that this is somehow a fire hazard.

Anyway, I might as well make this a post about music (which is somewhat related to why my brain exploded). Hmm? What's that?

Oh. You're not a musician, and feel like you won't understand this post?

Never fear. Allow me to run you up to speed.

Music is normally written with a bunch of kinda cool looking lines and squiggles. Musicians normally perform a complicated algorithm to transform the symbols on the page to music. Now, in order to keep musicians on the same page, a conductor (that dude with the baton that always looks kinda silly) makes some arcane motions that denote where we are in the music. The players simply play what they read from left to right, top to bottom until they get to the end of the piece, perhaps making a few stylistic changes (such as loudness) on their own. Everything else is written for us, and we just play what we see, working together to blend and sound as one.

Its rather simple in reality, and the result is the audio equivalent of a beautiful, epic painting.

Now, when I showed up to wind ensemble practice today our conductor said something a little scary.

Conductor: "I'm going to pass out one of the pieces we're doing for our spring concert. I know it's early yet, but you'll need a few days to get your head around it."

This should have sent up a warning flag, but it didn't. I was mildly curious at what we might be playing. We got three sheets of paper, two were instructions on how to play the music, and the next was a slightly weird piece of music. Instead of flowing from the top left corner to the bottom right, it was broken into numbered sections.

Not normal, but not too hard to understand. I'm sure it was just some little quirk that was easier to write this way. Not. At. All. Allow me to quote from the playing instructions, giving commentary.

"All performers play from the same page of 53 melodic patterns played in sequence."
Not all that scary, but this is a little confusing. Why number them if we're just going to play them in sequence?

"Patterns are to be played consecutively with each performer having the freedom to determine how many times he or she will repeat each pattern before moving on to the next."
What. The. Hell? This goes against like every fundamental law of music ever. Like… like… ok, that above example was given because it showed how awesome music is when everyone works together. This is like some kind of music battle royal. I might as well just hold down one note, and not give a damn about what is happening around me. You know what? According to this, I don't even have to play. It's my choice. I can just sit on the stage and !@#$ing smile for all it matters. Or just repeat the first numbered pattern the whole time.

This is like a kick to the musical groin of every other artist on the planet. Ok, maybe, just maybe, there is some mathematical rule, some limit to the madness.

"There is no fixed rule as to the number of repetitions a pattern may have," You know what? Banana. It makes just about as much sense as that line did, but wait, there's a comma. I'm going to sit here and cling to my fading sanity that there is some limit to this.

"since performers normally average between 45 minutes and an hour and a half, it can be assumed that one would repeat each pattern from somewhere between 45 seconds and a minute and a half."
That's my musical law to this piece? A suggestion? How are we supposed to get 35+ musicians to sound good together with a suggestion? I couldn't believe it. It's the equivalent of a football coach walking out on his team and telling them, "Don't suck, and try to win". No way would anyone actually perform this piece so I decided to YouTube it.

Well, some jerk decided to, and if I were to draw what I heard, I'd pick this:

This is called chance music, because there might be some chance that something that might resemble music's ugly cousin will come out of this. You know, if you set up enough monkeys at enough typewriters, you'll get Shakespeare. That doesn't mean you ACTUALLY TRY IT!

I think I'm gonna need a mop for my brain mess.