Indeterminacy: Some Considerations
Roger Reynolds · Perspectives of New Music · 1965
Indeterminacy1 in music is a thorny but admirable ideal. Chance2 is an even more formidable objective, one which is almost never approached in spite of the frequency with which the term is invoked. As ideas (and rather elusive ones) indeterminacy and chance have had penetrating effect, but they invade some of the most tender areas of the artistic ego: craft, expressiveness, and individuality. The subject-suggestiveness, and the possibility of unforeseen but excellent results -is understandably attractive, but hard to come to terms with in a completely satisfactory manner. I see improvisation, indeterminacy, and chance as progressive degrees of a tendency to leave detail unspecified. The latter two are distinct from improvisation in that the notion of a common practice is excluded a priori. If one wants the stylized freedom of improvisation, an appropriately framed set of conventions is necessary. If, on the other hand, a composer wants an indeterminate situation, there can be no preferred solutions-and, ultimately, in the case of chance, virtually no rules. To write a piece according to any principles and in any manner is to propose, in some sense, an occasion for experience. Traditionally, composers absorbed and more or less judiciously strained prevailing conventions, and most still do, although the conventions tend to be less widespread, almost private at times. Success in conventional music depends to a considerable degree upon an ability to play the moment-to-moment game skillfully. The composer of chance music3 must suggest an environment in which some uniquely circumscribed world of (usually) sound events will regularly occur. The world of possibilities-the environment-must reoccur, not a particular selection. He must achieve a distinctive end without the aid of what is known as craft (systematic prescription of detail). To compensate for a relaxed control over the nature and interrelation of sounds, theatricality is sometimes used. The eye's involvement does mitigate the ear's tedium, but theater (too often, amusement) as a substitute for self-sufficient sound is not defensible in the way that theatrical elaboration or illumination of sound materials is. The actions necessary to produce a sound, or an itinerant percussionist's movements could be significant, but this potential has only rarely been tapped. Webern's Piano Variations, Op. 27, suggest the possible importance, for example, of the perception of action (the disposition of notes between the hands, or, for structural purposes, the alternation of which hand is assigned to recurring materials) as a technique of contrapuntal clarification and elaboration, or, of