Content, Form, Process

This is the text of a talk that I gave to the Musical Association of Ireland in 2006.

There is a constant and ongoing tension in musical composition between form, content and process. This relationship is usually put in such a way as to ignore process altogether, and put form and content into some sort of chicken/egg relationship: the form comes first, for example, and the content just gets poured in like jelly into a mould, or the inverse case, content comes first, and the form is expressed as a result of the statement of the musical argument. Most musical composition exists in a state of tension between these two ideas, with musical processes of some kind often used to either generate content, or to generate the form, by means of a mechanical manipulation of the material.

A difficulty with some contemporary music is that we cannot grasp the form of the piece because we are unable to grasp the sounding objects (the processes in some cases, or the content or argument in others) which articulate the form. In Classical music, these objects are recognisable motifs or themes, and these normally recur within a specific tonal context. We have learned to expect an opening statement in D major, for example, to be recapitulated in D major towards the end of the piece. In a lot of  music written since the early twentieth century, this palette of musical objects is expanded to include things like textures, densities, and timbres. Additionally familiar musical parameters are often stretched to the point where we can no longer (see the wood because of the trees) hear the music because of the notes or rests. I was reminded of this recently during a concert in the Living Music Festival in Dublin some years back, in which a piece by Morton Feldman called Piano and String Quartet used a similar idea to a prelude by J.S. Bach, in which the repetition of a single motif with an altered harmonic context for the entire piece was the substance of the music, the difference being that the prelude takes about  90 seconds to play, while the quintet in that performance took 90 minutes. Some people left, obviously unable to miss their trains, or unable to bear the tension, or unable to figure out what was going on. Obviously, if we have difficulty in recognising these signposts and similarities with other musical contexts, we need to expand our listening capabilities in order that we can better enable ourselves to grasp music which uses new ideas and expands on old ones.

Let’s start with what I see as the broad definitions of these three aspects of composition: Content, Form, and Process: Content in music is what the composer wants you to hear; it’s the nub of the idea which they want to communicate to you. It’s what the music is about; Form is the way composers shape this content into manageable chunks which you as the listener can assimilate; and Process is the means they use to project the musical idea across time. Now, If I ask you what a book is about, you can tell me the plot, or you can tell me what the book is about. The plot, maybe, is the form, in that it’s what happens during the course of the book, or it could be a process which gradually unfolds what the book is about, but it’s not necessarily what the book is actually about... 

As an example of the difference between these three parameters, I’m going to take examples from a piece you all know: the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony: the opening two chords, and the last three chords define the total outline of the first movement; within that there are certain formal landmarks:  the statements and restatements of the exposition (and having heard that latter you should recognise that this moves off somewhere else into the argument or development), then the passage which brings us back to the return of the opening idea, which is why it’s called the recapitulation; there’s also the passage which brings us into a further expansion of ideas, the coda as it is called, and which obviously relates to two passages played previously. These are the landmarks which indicate the main divisions of the piece into its formal sections of exposition development, recapitulation and coda. 

But with these sections there are also processes going on: as an example, there’s a short one: around three and a half minutes in,  in which somewhat static harmony becomes increasingly mobile, then pushes on as result of momentum which it gains during the process. Andthen just before the 6 minute mark there’s the reverse process in which mobile harmony becomes increasingly static.

There’s a longer process which articulates a larger section which is about from the eighth to the ninth minute in, with sinking harmony and a massive dissonance towards the end  of the passage which isn’t really resolved...And that dissonance, and the process of its resolution, becomes the entire driving force, the content, for the rest of the piece, because of several processes in the coda of the piece in which that dissonance is referred to...(at around 16’04” and 16’14”) before finally resolving a few bars before the end.
This resolution happens a full 8 minutes after the initial dissonance which provokes it, and it’s a long time to wait, which is why it takes a while to set up the expectation again with the two earlier attempts at resolution. These early attempts aren’t failures to resolve, there are merely reminders, promises that the resolution will take place, but later on. So we have the content of the piece (the resolution of that massive dissonance) dictating the form of the piece (the coda in which the resolution occurs is 134 bars long, longer than any other coda in any symphony written prior to this), and articulated by smaller processes, as I outlined.

By the time we get to Wagner, form becomes a very fluid thing, and yet the same things occur: we just need to expand the scale on which we listen. Take two short extracts (short by Wagner's standards...) from Tristan as examples: first, the creation of the tension in the section of Act 2 scenes ii that starts with “So Starben wir” and leads directly into the interruption of the lovers at the entry of Kurwenal at the start of scene iii; then, some 2 hours later, the same music, in the famous "Liebestod" but this time leading to catharsis, and dissipation or resolution of the tension. 

I’ve referred so far only to music by Beethoven and Wagner, but my point is that similar formal devices, and processes are found in more contemporary music. How are we to deal with the music of Conlon Nancarrow, for example Player Piano Study Number 1 by Conlon Nancarrow?  Here, what we have to do is stream our listening consciousness into horizontal layers. It helps if we listen to an orchestrated version of the piece: we can hear that individual layers use individual timbres, and we can hear that the form is the result of the process of the saturation of the musical space by the individual elements in each layer, and this saturation takes place by a process of progressively reducing the time interval between the elements of each of the layers. 

A similar piece, would be Ligeti's Piano Study Number 1, Désordre.  Here,  two processes once again articulate the form of the piece into 2 sections, this time on the piano, which requires us to stream our listening into horizontal layers: if we don’t do this we only hear disorder, which is the title of the piece. The absence of individual timbres makes the streaming harder to do, but we are assisted by the register in which the different layers happen.


A piece like Metastasis by Xenakis becomes much more manageable if we can mentally and perceptually break it up into manageable sections: It’s 9 minutes long, but no single section is longer than 2 minutes; If we focus our attention on how new elements enter the piece, it becomes quite easy to orientate ourselves so that we can aurally stand back and see the way the different sections fit together. The opening glissando of around one minute and twenty seconds leads to an interjection of new material on brass  at around two minutes; then more glissandi lead to a contrapuntal string section at around 3 minutes, which is redirected by a pizzicato interjection at around four and a half minutes, and so on, until the last glissando to g sharp which ends the piece. The content of the piece is derived from the conception of time as a representation of physical space, and musical material as a representation of matter whose behaviour is governed by forces which are expressed by formulae, processes, that are applied to the music much as a scientist might graph a function, or an architect a shape. 

The processes of Xenakis lie behind the music, and are often inaudible, but the content, the idea which he wants to put across, comes through nonetheless.

At the other extreme of this continuum, we have music such as that of Steve Reich. Reich,  who was here recently, puts audible processes at the top of the hierarchy, making large-scale formal considerations  match those of the processes themselves: "One process, One structure" is how we might summarise this approach, although it does oversimplify matters when we come to consider his later music when he places several processes end to end to create multi-facetted pieces. Take for example, the first movement of “Tehillim” in which a melody  becomes segmented into smaller sections which are then repeated and treated using one of the oldest of musical process: 4-part canon, or a 4-part delay in time

I’d like to refer to a piece by Massimo Botter, one of Italy’s most renowned younger composers.
His extraordinary trio for violin cello and piano “La Nube di Oort” was finished on 25th August 2004, according to the score. In this piece, Botter creates a sound world in which the existence of harmonic attractors as the foci of melodic gestures is equated with the formation of comets in the Oort Clouds. This piece is full of extra-musical implications and ideas which are realised through careful calculation. This is a complex score, but it might be of some use to visualise the individual lines of the instruments as elliptical paths which are rotating around different  harmonic masses or axes which keep them in check. We can hear fairly static harmonic areas, around which the melodic lines gyrate. Towards the end of the piece, the harmonic movement becomes gradually more static until it oscillates gently to bring the piece to a close. 


In my own music, I try to balance these three perspectives of music, form, content and process. I often use processes, in order to create movement, my forms tend to be open, without direct or large scale recapitulation, while my “content”, more often than not, is a broad idea which permeates the piece and is usually referred to in my titles.