Scalar Order as a Compositional Resource
Ben Johnston · Perspectives of New Music · 1964
WHEN LISTENING to music we hear changing sound qualities in rhythmic patterns which create an illusion of growth. Most people hear music most readily as rhythmic gesture. Their musical present moment is the beat, the bar, the phrase (or the equivalents of these in less traditional music). Tone qualities, noise textures, and pitch combinations make up the musical which are composed into rhythmic gestures. These different kinds of phenomenal Gestalts are, physically speaking, different modes of vibration. Qualities and relationships of sounds are our way of perceiving great numbers of tiny events (vibrations) on a molecular scale. We cannot hear these individual events, but we can easily detect order in the patterns they make.1 The rhythmic gestures composed of these qualities and relationships are in turn composed into larger patterns. These larger contexts are not directly perceptible. Memory reconstructs images of them once we have heard them. Even as we listen to a musical composition for the first time, expectations can grow in us which result from an intuitive grasp of the larger design patterns of the music. The act of musical composition relates the order and pattern of sound vibrations to the order and pattern of musical shapes of larger duration. A composer makes the two interdependent by means of his construction and deployment of musical order on the scale of ordinary rhythmic perception.2 When we listen for practical purposes, we identify objects and actions by their sounds. This recognition depends upon a recognition of similar patterns of sound vibration. To listen musically is to turn one's attention to details of the sound patterns and to interrelations of these patterns on