The Imaginary Pieces, Two descriptions

March 1998

I started writing the imaginary pieces in 1998.
They are a long-reach outcome of a debate I had
with John Cage the final time I consulted with him
in Evanston (in 1992) when I performed
Europera5 with Yvar Mikhashoff. At the time one
of our students asked John the (transparent)
question: what is music? And John responded (after
the well-versed theatrical pause and the small
winning smile) it must have something to do with sound.
I (erroneously) postulated that he meant that it
must have something to do with physical sound. And I
interrogated him about illusory timbres. Sounds
that I detect when I conceive of them. These are
compositions that are actualized in my mind, and
have no province in the material sphere. This led
me to an abundance of investigations with
utterances that evoke sounds and time.
Consequently I comprehended that the recollection
of music does not tackle continuance, as it seems to
be perceived in the physical realm. It shrivels time
towards an individual instant. For example when a
person pronounces the words “Bach Goldberg’s
Variations” I respond with a clear acoustical
memory, a sound in my mind, which is an
encapsulation of the whole piece with the passage
of time embedded in it. It is not just the label of the
name of the piece, but an allusion that embraces
time and the music’s advancement in it. I attempted
shaping such moments in my music, individual
instants that were designed to elicit the
continuousness of time. Recent pieces present an
effort to invent a composition that in each and
every moment depicts its whole.
This year I adopted a changed route, fabricating
pieces that transpire only in the audience’s mind.
They have no physical attributes. Each has
disparate explicit directions of how it should be
presented: some are executed while other music is
being played and others in silence. A piece is
invariably performed by providing every member
of the audience with a reproduction of the score, to
be read in silence without an origination of any
physical sounds.
When writing these pieces I unraveled new
things; about time propelling backwards (it is not
symmetrical to the motion forward), and about the
perceived and determined beauty of sounds, and
most of all about our agreements as audience
members about what it is that we listened to.

A new Description ‐ Feb 15, 2009.

The interest in text pieces came about from two directions. I started writing text scores
for improvisation ensembles in 1988 when working on Nautilus a collaboration of live
dance/video/music at SF State University. These pieces use texts to convey instructions
to musicians, and are made of language taken from the traditional discourse of westernculture
musicians. The most useful feature that came out of this
pieces/process/research was that I found out that I could specify time in the score in a
non‐linear way. For example consider the instruction “start by playing this melody and
continue improvising on it on and off for the next few minutes, when you are not
improvising you may whistle a tune or dance a jig” (this is not a quote from a specific
piece but a useful example.) In this example the discourse is one of western‐musicians ‐
“melody, improvising, tune, jig” are all words that have specific meanings in this
discourse. But Time, in this example, is flexible, i.e. the composer doesn’t know how
long this section of the piece would be (“few minutes,”) and also non‐linear. The text
describes the action for the full length of the section (“on and off for a few minutes,”)
and then goes back in time to fill, with new sounds or actions, the holes that were left in
time.
The second direction, which led me to a new and different type of text pieces, is based
on a response that John Cage made in one of our classes at Northwestern University to
the question “what is music?” To which he responded, “it must have something to do
with sound.” It took me several years to ponder this statement, and discover that what
made me uncomfortable about it was my interpretation that sound is a literal physical
entity, but the other aspect of “sound” the imaginary one, the one we can recalled in
our mind without any physical sensation, I treated as a separate entity. This started a
process of compositional activity that I group under the heading “imaginary pieces.” The
listener in her/his mind without any physical sensation creates these pieces. The
discourse here uses the English language within its normal day‐today use, and,
importantly, within the bounds of western culture. So images like “the beeping sound of
a life support system” are used to evoke a sound, which, it is assumed, is familiar to any
TV watching western culture based audience and is quite precise in its sound contents.
And when the image “a flute like pretty melody,” is used, it is intended to evoke a less
determined sound but one that we, participants in Western Culture, know many things
about its sound contour. Composing in the mind of the audience entails, I believe,
describing the sounds in words, so the choice of language and the determination of its
cultural context are imperative. And, obviously, this encourages the translations of the
text to the language of the local of the performance. Since I believe that most
performances of the pieces happen on‐line, English seemed to be the most appropriate
and relevant choice.
The term “discourse”, rather then “performance practice,” is chosen because
“Discourse” within our academic/artistic discourse clearly identifies cultural context and
social structures as components of the discussion; on the other hand, the term
“performance practice” is placed within musicians’ discourse and seems to make these
two distinctions blurry. “Performance Practice” refers to a body of knowledge that a
musician performing a piece uses, “Discourse” encompasses both that discussion and
also the body of knowledge that the audience employs when it listens to a piece of
music or is involved in the performance of music.
I found two very powerful tools in this discourse. The first is that it provided me with the
ability to mix ugly sounds with beautiful ones without having the “ugliness” become an
issue of discussion between the composer and the audience. If asked to imagine “ugly”
sounds an audience member will choose a sound that is appropriately ugly for her/him.
The second tool is derived from the ability to choose words according to how they
sound and place them next to each other to create rhythmic patterns; this is obvious
and elementary in the discourse of poets. “This sound is tremendously slow,
tremendously slow,” attempts to convey the sound by using the sound of the “s” and
makes an effort to influence the rhythm by repeating the words. This, as in poetry, may
get lost in a translation, so the use of it is limited.
In the imaginary pieces the audience is provided with a sheet of paper on which the text
is printed, and given a certain time to read the text and play the sound in their head.
The notation and layout is important as it does imply certain musical elements. Size of
words and the distance between them are, it is assume, translated into accents and
spaces in time in the imaginary music. There was a suggestion that I project the text one
line at a time, gaining more control of the time process, and the unfolding of the piece
in the mind. I may do a piece like that in the future (perhaps very soon,) but I found that
idea problematic for the older pieces, significantly because the flexibility of non‐linear
time may be lost. For example a sentence such as “earlier a melody sung by an old
female Arab voice started but it just now became noticeable,” may lose the power it has
of moving backwards in time. If time is explicit as it is when the line appears in the
projection in a pre‐specified moment, the conviction that we moved backwards in time
may be lost. But, as I said, this new idea has my interest, and it does seem to solve one
problem that the text pieces have: that descriptions of time of different durations are
read at equal duration. For example, “the low timbre becomes louder very slowly, “ and
“the high sound becomes softer very quickly,” take the same amount of time to read,
but should take different lengths of time to play in one’s head.
As I am writing this I am reading Oliver Sachs’ book Musicophilia. It’s a wonderful
amazing book that summarizes the current research on how the brain processes music,
sound, and the memory of music. There is abundant evidence that the ability to imagine
music and sound is very common to all of us, and the ability to create new music in the
mind, one that is based on memories of music, is also common. My imaginary pieces, in
this context, seem very obvious, and not at all radical or unusual.
The imaginary pieces present an expression of another one of my interests, that of
audience/performer/composer interactions. For many years I’ve struggled with the role
of the audience and their placement in the physical world of music representation, and
how it influences the music itself. There are many different issues that arise in this
discussion. One of the firsts that comes to my mind is that of the traditional concert
setting where the audience comprises of a trapped group of like‐minded individuals
attached to their seats for the duration of the music. In any live music concert the
audience is identified as a group of equal members, equal in that they are all there for
the same reason ‐ to listen to the music. This can be, and is, sometime translated to
mean that they are also going through an identical, and mutual experience, and that
everyone hears the music in the same way. This is the basis of, for example, music
criticism, where the critic is responding to a performance, which it is assumed, all
attending heard in the same fashion. This is a notion that I reject, many times I came out
of a concert and while attempting to describe to my friends what it is I heard, I
discovered that they heard something else altogether. In the classical music world the
situation are even more restrictive, the audience is placed in such a way (with the
lights are on,) which makes leaving the hall in the middle of a piece close to impossible.
Obviously it is a choice that they made responsibly in advance, but can people not
change their minds?
But Perhaps the most significant question that arises, for me, as an aspect of the
traditional placement of the audience, is that the sound we hear as musicians is so
different to the one the audience hears. When one is on stage, for example in the
orchestra, the choir, or next to a single pianist, the sound one hears is much richer (to
my mind,) and all engulfing then any sound projected to the audience sitting in the
auditorium and hearing the music either directly or through audio speakers. How do you
get the audience to move among the performers, to feel free to move in and out of the
space, and to get a sense that their experience is both individual and collective are
questions that I tried to solve to varying success in different pieces (The Andy Warhol
Diaries, NU Piece, Cruising Prohibited When Lights Flashing) in the installations (the
Speakers Suit, The Speakers Army Jacket, Attention Step,) and in the imaginary pieces. In
the imaginary pieces the individual and private is expressed and emphasized, the
audience member is the performer. The total experience and the sounds created to
represent it are clearly individual, and it is the commonality of the experience that is
uncertain and may be discussed. The freedom of the choice of involvement with the
piece is held exclusively within the purgative of the listener/performer.