Various Meditations on Musical Composition

by NICK NASSAFA

Various drafts of some of these essays can be found on my Tumblr here.

Minor Referential Issues in Hip Hop—Text as Composition

Subtitled: First draft?

Rap music is the only genre of American music that’s achieved any degree of mainstream popularity that’s actually, successfully, diverged from the basic principles of European harmony. When you really think about it, earlier periods of rap barely even contained what we would consider notes—they were essentially accelerated and rhythmic speech juxtaposed with percussive loops juxtaposed with DJ scratches juxtaposed with maybe a short melodic phrase (sampled) that was looped again and again, alongside the drums. 

Other songs, true, indulge in more complex melodic structures in their beats, a good amount of popular rap today has integrated quite a bit of pop and rock harmonic structures, but ‘true hip hop’ songs usually  make no explicit reference to chords, or chord progressions—a ‘beat’ after all, by definition, being static in nature—which is obviously the fulcrum of any theory of harmony. 

In this sense rap is a new frontier structurally, its main preoccupations are timbre—of the voice, of the percussion—and tempo, with the level of acceleration of speech being generally associated with a greater skill level. Instead of concerning itself with the particulars of aggregating chords and developing equal tempered melodic patterns, it’s concerned itself instead with the minute details of timbre and tempo of the voice—and also, of course, the language that acts as a reference point. 

In this sense it’s tempting to categorize rap—because it’s so acutely language dependent—as a genre of language-compositions, texts that are in themselves compositions, and, sure, that can be true in select cases, but let me push back just ever so slightly on that concept: to the extent emcees write to beats I would personally argue that they’re not actually creating textual compositions. No—they’re retrofitting their language to an orchestral component. 

This was my chief issue as I approached rap, trying to ‘make music’. It was actually strenuous! Essentially what I wanted to do was divorce the language of rap from the 4/4 drum loop, from any set orchestration really, which, to be fair, isn’t entirely new—plenty of underground rappers write raps and actually rap in ways that are essentially discrete from the beat. But to the best of my knowledge there wasn’t any real system to that sort of off-beat rapping, you know? (This is what Robert Ashley was concerned with in an adjacent way.) The rap may have diverged from the mechanics of the beat, but did it introduce a separate set of mechanics? What I needed was a musical structure that I could plug the English language into, something somewhat formalized—that would divorce it from the beat, yet still retain a measurable logic, to some degree.

There’s a silent component in all of my text-based compositions. The silence is normal speech, specifically the tempo of normal speech. I’ve attempted to create a language-based musical rubric that’s based on fractal geometry, on the golden ratio 1.618 that informs the structure of the rap, of the composition itself, making it a truly independent musical line, that, yes, can still be supported and juxtaposed against a beat, but is no longer referential to the beat. We’re dealing with a form of monophony here—monophony, which is, in my view, derided in the West with no real basis, in my opinion with a total lack of thought!

In all of my compositions there’s a silent line—it’s the silence speech uttered at approximately 233 syllables per minute, which is, give or take, the normal tempo of spoken American English, that’s underpinning the approximately 377 syllable per minute raps, which represent the normal pace of speech accelerated by the golden ratio of 1.618. The idea is that listeners implicitly will hear how they normally speak underneath the language they’re listening to.

In addition the structure of the text adheres to the elements of the Fibonacci sequence as well—for Only Exaggeration Can Make Things Clear, On Incongruities and Recollection as Fabrication, and Body Hair Awareness Month, each verse consists of 5 lines, each line consists of a range of syllables, between 34 and 55 syllables. That’s just for those particular records, but there are obviously many other combinations—8 lines, 13 and 21 syllables, 21 and 34 syllables, 13 lines, etc etc.

Essentially what I’ve attempted to do here—it’s mutate traditional rap into something that’s no longer referential to orchestration, that can still be combined with traditional (or non-traditional orchestration), not unlike, say rebetika, married the long microtonal melodic lines of Byzantine and Ottoman music to Western European chord structures. But, at bottom, the text is its own independent line of monophonic music, which, in my view, is just as complex and rich as harmonic music.

Macrotonality & Category Theory

Subtitled: Can A Tempo Be A Modal Space?

(Extended Version)

Some people have said that speech is music, that the most primary function of sound is the recitation of words that name things (i.e. God only needs to say ‘Be’ and it is; Adam is the mirror in which Allah sees His Names; the work of Robert Ashley). But at the same time you can’t just talk over a beat and call it music.

In mathematics—based on my admittedly extremely rudimentary understanding—SET Theory basically attempts to identify some structure by the composition of, say, the points that comprise it, whereas CATEGORY Theory instead momentarily ignores the specific points of composition and instead views the structure as a single unit (i.e. a human as an individual operating in a social milieu and not solely a compilation of red blood cells, organs, and tissue, etc), and then measures said units by its relation to other local units. 

Set Theory, to my mind, is how you would compose music if using something like a piano, where each musical line is broken down into precise notes that have static individual values themselves (12 tones, equally tempered, etc), while Category Theory would probably be useful for composing using a structure like language, where the words are comprising a melodic line, but at the same time the words themselves lack a static individual musical value. 

This is basically, at a high level, macrotonality to me—where complex recitation (erm, “rapping”) is viewed as a single wave (or line), and is then in turn measured by its RELATION to other structures in its orbit. In the macrotonal case, the wave is defined by its TIME VALUE, which is in this case syllables per minute. That value has a relationship with the normal tempo of speech (which is latent), and it also has a relation with the time values of the other active components (“beats,” “percussion,” “drum loops,” “guitar solos,” etc etc.)

The wave’s relation to time integrates it relationally into the rest of the composition, as opposed to its internal line structure or rhyme scheme. So the wave itself is operating by its own internal logics (it contains line structure and rhyme schemes, human beings have kidneys and skin cells) but within the composition itself it’s identified by its CATEGORICAL TIME QUOTIENT, which is, again, in this case expressed in syllables per minute, and is relational to other components (as well as latent normalized speech).

In other words—we’ve considered groups of tones as modes, but can’t a range of tempo be a mode as well? Existing within a degree of time can be an art as well, can’t it? Simply put: Can tempo be a modal space? This is the final entry in a trilogy I’m calling Dead In The Middle Of Little Italy Trapped In A Golden Rectangle, and it’s based on this idea that acceleration of a precise type (1.618x) is a mode, that recitation within plus-minus 5% of 377 syllables per minute is an actual mode of music. Myka 9 is a truly epic American composer. We should admit that much. 

Composing Spaceship for Sale

Subtitled: What's Macrotonal?

Composing music to some extent is a philosophical judgment on how we interpret the physical world. You can’t escape this ultimately. Ultimately you either continue with a status quo so to speak, a so-called status quo, or you deviate in some substantial manner or another. How you deviate is your philosophical judgment on the world to some extent. You may think, “Oh, haha, I’m going to make a song. Compose some music!” and think in turn that by doing so it’s just some fun thing. But it’s actually the furthest thing from some fun thing. It’s actually incredibly serious, this composing of music. You either make a substantial philosophical judgment on the physical world as you understand it, which inevitably contains the metaphysical world within it (not vice versa as is often supposed). No. These are actually really serious decisions you inevitably are forced to make when composing sound, arranging sound, so-called making music. 

Whether we like it or not essentially we have to build things, compose structures, by reducing wave-like phenomena to smaller discrete units. Without discrete units our understanding of the world is essentially impossible. Language is itself a function of the discrete unit! Yet at the same time on some level we remain aware that discrete units are probably lurid fictions. Probably! But who’s to say really? In music, or Western music, the harmonic tradition, these discrete units traditionally are pitched notes, which exist in physical space, which have physical frequencies assigned to them octave by octave, which date all the way back to the invention of the piano and the twelve tone equally tempered scale. 

Most of us never question the veracity of this construct. Music is of course a derivation of arranging a series of pitched notes according to very specific mathematical relations that we usually just call harmony. This is composing music for most of us, and most of us will never leave this state of affairs, and most of us probably shouldn’t! The major and minor scales with their notes and chords, those are perfectly fine for many of us! Some of us, however, will follow a path of microtonality, which in a material sense is just following the path of quantum physics (or vice versa). If a note is an atom, the world of the microtone is the musical world of subatomic particles. You know, technically there’s an infinite spectrum of sound between each semitonal, you know! We’ll say things like that when we’re enamored with microtones. You know, just like between 1.9 and 2.0, there are infinite regressions of, like, 1.9999, and 1.999999, and 1.999999997 and shit, there are the same regressions between D and E flat. 

This isn’t wrong, but these are the types of things we’ll say if we’re doing the microtone thing. But basically we’re still talking about discrete units. And specifically how we define them! Maybe discrete units aren’t actually discrete units! Because obviously, obviously, at a certain point these infinite regressions of microtones and split atoms starts to make us wonder if a discrete unit is even possible. Like we said, discrete units are probably fictions that are used primarily to enable us to understand the world. But at the same time, what if the opposite were true? 

What if, theoretically, what if discrete units in fact did exist, but rather than being smaller than atoms and tones, rather than regressing into infinite decimal points of misery, what if the discrete unit of music was actually a fully-formed sequence. That wasn’t reducible to a series of pitched notes per se, but could only be assigned a value in aggregate. (Not entirely different from a pitched note!) Like a tempo. Like a rap verse. What if that was used as a discrete unit, as the basis of a composition of music. A piece of text but recited at an accelerated tempo so that it’s actually musical in nature. Time of course changes things essentially. Tempo is essentially an intensive form of time, like degrees, percentages, and all that. 

So if we take just speech itself, but if we change it’s time value then it becomes something that’s no longer speech as we understand. Rap music has taught us this in this country, that the English language when accelerated becomes a musical line. And it’s totally cool that rap music still views notes as the discrete units that make up bars that are adjustable in some type of atomic manner. But isn’t it possible that’s fictitious? But not in an infinite regression sense of tiny particles and shit? But in a wave-as-unit type of way? But this has always been the difficulty with the notion of text-as-composition, the operas of Robert Ashley come to mind. 

The text can’t be referential. The text must be the point of reference. But in order to be a point of reference a fungible value has to be assigned to the text, which can then inform the subsequent tone and sound elements. If the text is the root of the composition then the text must have a mathematical and/or musical value that can then inform the subsequent elements. If you give me a beat in 4/4 time at 100 BPM with a certain sequence of kicks and snares, I can write 3,000 bars to said beat, but the text will inevitably be in reference to the beat, so while we can say the composition may be text-focused, sure, it’s not a text-as-composition. 

Rap music is the most language-focused music perhaps in existence. Yet it’s still not text-as-composition. The elements of the composition, they derive from a fulcrum of a beat. It’s the same if you write in equal bars. You’re writing a beat of vocals. No. That’s not text composition. Language requires a new form of musical measurement to truly become composed. If you take a chunk of measured yet unequal prose and vocalize that, then that vocalization perhaps becomes a discrete unit, not to be memorized and performed over and over. It can be ascribed a mathematical value that can then be translated into a sound milieu. 

Syllables per minute is a value. If a piece of text is actualized at 200 syllables per minute, then you could arrange a set of tones at 50 BPM and you’d have a 4:1 ratio of text to derived tones. Tone deriving from text. The syllables then essentially become 16th notes. The text becomes the composition. In short, the voice memos of dialogue-based rap verses are the discrete units used to compose Unique Towels, Moons of Uranus, GILF Sundays and various other compositions eventually to be released in this vein. Yet each, while telling a story in some vaguely traditional linear sense, while even functioning as allegories in some sense, are first and foremost philosophical judgments on the world itself. First and foremost that’s basically what they are.

Perfect Lives: A Brief Analysis

In a sense there’s nothing at all like Perfect Lives in modern music, but in another sense Perfect Lives is the longest Fall record ever made. Both Robert Ashley and Mark E. Smith did something not altogether dissimilar in concept—they demoted orchestration to something of an afterthought. Obviously, in the case of Perfect Lives, Blue Gene Tyranny isn’t exactly an afterthought, not at all (although the drum loops? Possibly!), but his piano playing, strictly speaking, isn’t part of Ashley’s composition. The opera is, ultimately, a Robert Ashley Opera. 

In a sense this is a reversal in structure of traditional opera that isn’t really emphasized enough in analyses of Ashley’s work—whereas someone like Wagner was both composer and librettist, for many opera composers, they’d often would employ a librettist for the text, yet the opera would remain headlined by the person ultimately responsible for the orchestration. The librettist really just being a portion of the ensemble.

In Ashley’s case, and particularly in the case of Perfect Lives, the roles are reversed. Ashley employed Blue Tyranny to write and improvise the piano lines behind his text and voice, but the opera is a Robert Ashley Opera—i.e. the composition is fundamentally text and voice, and while there are other components (orchestration, drum loops, piano playing), they’re ultimately tertiary in importance.

The Fall did something similar, just in a rock context, with the Fall at bottom being, to paraphrase, Mark E. Smith and your grandma on the bongos. There was a rotating cast of instrumentalists that became part of the band during its history, and different segments of fandom have their favorites, etc, but the fulcrum of the music was always the language and voice of Mark E Smith. So something, again, not entirely dissimilar from Perfect Lives.

Yet there’s also something post-Ottoman about Robert Ashley and Mark E. Smith, although I’m not sure if either would agree with that assessment. I’m reminded of Rebetika—maybe the most post-Ottoman genre—where elaborate, highly ornamental, long, vocal, melodic lines are then almost randomly juxtaposed with, say, a chord. The orchestra is both tertiary and also purely perpendicular.

The Inversion of Melisma

“This isn’t spoken word. It’s the reinvention of Sugar Hill.” - Sole

You can’t discuss recitation in America without interfacing with Rap music. I mean. You can. But it would be disingenuous to do so. Not that I’m totally opposed to being disingenuous. There are times when being disingenuous is totally necessary. Just not in this particular case. When I’m discussing music theory and shit. 

But what makes rap Rap exactly. No. Let’s. Just this one time. In the service of actually discussing the purely musical components of what deem quote-unquote “rap.” Let’s strip the subjectivity from the equation completely. Subjectivity is. Honestly? It’s so 20th Century to me. This notion of so-called personal experience. Ugh. It’s so sterile. This is perhaps post-subjectivity. 

Anyway. What makes rap Rap? Musically? Well it’s obviously speed. It’s tempo. I mean. Okay. To some extent it’s rhyme. It’s the concept of the bar. These are true. But it’s mostly tempo. It’s speech. But contracted so that it operates at an accelerated pace. Obviously the speech needs to be stylistic. In one way or another. It needs to be good. But beyond that. What chiefly distinguishes rap from. For example. Spoken word poetry. Is that it has an increased tempo. And that tempo has a relationship with a piece of music. Even if it’s an electronic loop (most of the time). Now. Sure. You can make an argument that a slower paced delivery. With a temporal relationship to a beat. That that’s still rap. Sure. I don’t disagree. That’s a valid exception to the rule. People can and do rap and slower tempos.

But what about melisma? Isn’t melisma. From Byzantine chant to the Qurra of the Islamic world to the Gospel singers of America. Isn’t that what people generally view as an apex of sorts? An ecstasy of sorts? Where the signifier of the syllable within the grammatical structure of language gets stretched into pure sound? Becomes perhaps unintelligible. Or at least less intelligible. But. Isn’t the inverse of that process double. Triple. Quadruple time rap? Except rather than an expansion of the signifier into (relative) unintellibility we have the contraction of the signifier into (relative) unintelligibility? Doesn’t that. Make perfect sense conceptually?

I think it does. The most quote-unquote technical rappers are the ones who. Generally speaking. Are on the faster side. Big Daddy Kane and Myka 9 started this like over thirty years ago now. And the realm of rap is. Whether you like it or not. Where the most advanced recitative singing and/or vocalization is done in the English language. The English language. With its 44 phonemes. And. What? Eleven vowel sounds? Is preternaturally disposed to the contraction of itself. As opposed to the expansion that the Romance languages are. Consonants are everywhere in English.

Yet one place where Rap has. At least very rarely. Dared to go is outside of this concept of bar. The vast (vast!) majority of rap is constructed on this concept. That the relationship between the vocal and the music is one of syncopation on the bar level. This is in the vernacular. The line of the rapper is supposed to match up with the bar of music. Obviously you should rhyme too. But the rhyme should always. Ideally. Land on the same snare. Or kick. Of each line of music. This is essentially a spatial relationship. The lines extend the same length. Length resides in space.

But you could have a temporal relationship too. Right? My idea is that. I don’t know. Maybe you write unequal lines of text. But the vocal and the music exist in a temporal relationship. Now that relationship doesn’t necessarily need to be 1:1. In fact I think it’s better if it’s not. But if you have a 4/4 beat at 90 BPM then you could equate each syllable of text to. Say. A 16th note. Which at 90 BPM would impute 360 syllables per minute rapped. So if you’re rapping at or around that rate. Then you’re in a 4x temporal relationship with the beat.

It’s really that simple! You could increase the BPM of that 4/4 beat to 180 BPM. The vocals can stay static. You’d be at a 2x relationship. Or syllables would be essentially 8th notes. This is audible. Even as the signifier becomes less. Yet in this instance there’s another inversion. There’s an inverted melisma. But compositionally. Realistically. You’re probably setting the BPM based on the vocal. As opposed to selecting a beat and then constructed a verse to rap over it at that set tempo. 

But to fit these many syllables into a verse? How uneven should they be? I’d personally say they should occupy the 8th interval of the Fibonacci sequence. Sitting somewhere between 34 and 55 syllables. Each line. That gives each line enough variability. But not too much variability. And it packs enough syllables into a single line that velocity can be reached. But there’s still room to. You know. Breathe?

Melisma is the. Extended technique? That brings the signifier of language into. As Charlie Looker notably said. Not into abstraction. But into raw material. Raw sound. There is no longer any representational reference. This is done by slowing. Expanding. By assigning many notes to a single syllables. The inversion of this is the opposite. But circuitously ends at a very similar results. By assigning many syllables to a single note. Quadruple time. The Ison and Byzantine cantor. The text. Of course it’s textual. But it’s. Via melisma. Or the inversion of melisma. It achieves a breaking with the signifier. A text as raw sound. As opposed to signifying representational items. It’s not a coincidence that the inversion of melisma has achieved popularity in America. 

In the English language. Melisma never sounds as good in English as it does in. Literally any other language. But especially the Romance languages. The Latin languages. Or the Semitic languages. But rap. The inversion of melisma. It never sounds quite as good in those Romance languages. The vowel-based languages. With fewer phonemes. They can’t stylize the inversion of melisma the way English can. Just as English. With 87 vowel sounds surrounded by infinite consonants. Can never get melisma to quite the technical level or Italian. Or Greek. Or Arabic. Yet this inversion of melisma. I mean. Melisma isn’t a bar-based style. Rap as we understand it today? It’s incapable of truly reaching appropriately unhinged levels of inverted Melisma. Melisma is naturally uneven. So to truly invert melisma. It requires a method to make the lines uneven. But still somehow relate to the specific music as well. Which has been shown here. 

Notes on Music (05.01.24)

Classical music as we understand it from Europe de-emphasized the human voice and tempo. The former tendency is somewhat unique. Other ‘classical’ traditions feature the human voice as a - if not the - focal point. Which makes some sense. The cheapest musical instrument is, after all, your voice. But harmonic music, which is essentially European music, which is arguably an extension of a well-tempered scale, eschews tempo as well as voice. 

But to be fair you can only focus on so much. And when you have a plethora of complex chords suddenly at your disposal, which themselves can be difficult to achieve even in isolation, never mind to progress in conjunction with other complex chords, then it’s understandable that tempo wouldn’t necessarily be a focal point. Likewise with the human voice. The human voice, unlike the guitar or piano, obviously can’t express two or three or four notes at once. Plus, it’s not naturally well-tempered like other melodic instruments. It’s inveterately microtonal (at least pre auto-tune). It requires not only the writing of notes but also the writing of words to truly compose for it. 

If we wanted to oversimplify things we could say that when the temperament of an octave is equal (i.e. 12-TET), then chords become more of an emphasis. And when chords become more of an emphasis the human voice and specific tempo necessarily become de-emphasized.

American pop and rock (which for a time at least was essentially synonymous with American pop) extend in a linear fashion from this emphasis of the chord of European classical music. Of course there are vocals in pop and rock. But the central component of the song is the chord and its progressions. The vocal extends from the chord and not vice versa. Even in rock’s more avant-garde offshoots like punk and metal the chord generally maintains its central location. It’s only when you get to the most extreme iterations, usually in metal, that this shifts at all (and even most death metal, to be fair, is still chord-driven). 

Rap, on the other hand, is an (African-)American music that became a popular music but that exists in contradistinction to the European classical model. In ‘traditional’ rap there are often no chords at all. And certainly no progressions. In fact, in traditional rap there are no instruments at all sans the human voice. Only samples of instruments: a drum break, a short looped instrumental passage. A bassline maybe. And then vocals (I’ll leave DJ cuts to the side for now). 

Rap is in essence a vocal music. Yet at the same time, as a vocal music, rap also takes into account the peculiar character of the English language. As opposed to, say, trying to mimic Italian opera. Forty four phenomes (unique sounds) exist in English, as opposed to an average of maybe 25 to 30 for other languages. That’s anywhere from 46 to 76% more unique sounds that the average world language contains. There are 11 vowels sounds. Most other languages have 5 or 6. So give or take 100% additional vowel sounds. All of this is to say that the English language, from a musical standpoint, is an extremely extended scale. It’s like playing guitar on 24 TET instead of 12 TET. Or playing a fretless string instrument as opposed a well-tempered one. The more an octave expands to more it tends toward melody over harmony.

Now if English just had more phenomes, but it’s vowel sounds were traditionally reduced? Then maybe you could fairly easily construct a music that’s less harmonic, more vocal, but more melismatic. Like Ottoman classical music. But the number of vowel sounds and English’s tendency toward hard consonants as opposed to free-flowing mellifluous long words make melisma more of an instrinsic challenge. And with vocal music . . . language must underpin the voice. Which makes the writing of a melismatic music more clunky.

But rap does away with this challenge by removing melisma altogether. No. Rap is a vocal music. Yes. But in place of melismatics it substitutes tempo. Rather than extending a syllable for three or four or five beats it extends the breath those beats. But then it fills that breath with as many syllables as it can possibly fit.

It allows the hard consonant tendency of English to achieve speed via tempo, as opposed to inviting clunkiness via melismatics. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a melody to rap. Obviously there is. But it’s the melody of the speech. The melody of the the mode. A reduced octave (because the octave has expanded). It’s the melody of speech just reimagined at an accelerated tempo. 

What I’ve just described could also just as easily describe the American operas of Robert Ashley.

Text as Composition: An Attempt

I.

1) This was the original idea of the KONTAKION in the Byzantine era; the text IS the musical score. (Romanos was literally a composer as much as a poet.) (This is still the official position of the Greek Orthodox church today.) (A "lost" (or obscured) genre of Indo-European classical music?)

2) Modified for English language — speech (text) as non-pitched. Creating VARIABLE PARAMETERS (as opposed to FIXED RULES) for the text that will create unique rhythms — somewhere between the endless repetition of iambic pentameter and the total lack of metrical restraint of prose.

3) (Using pitch scales of the Byzantine and Greek Orthodox chant, the Qari of the Quran, when enacting the text for "flair".)

II.

4) one TWO one TWO one TWO one TWO one TWO (ad infinitum, which is iambic pentameter in essence) isn't really a composition? Not quite musical?

5) Creating a framework, said Variable Parameter (i.e. a MODE), and then letting chance take its course (the improvisations of prose (Zuihitsu))—this, for our purposes equals a musical composition, a musical score (as well as an "epic poem").

6) Ex: The Variable Parameters of the First Mode of the Modal Meter: 

1. a) Repetitions to Syllables for each stanza (oikos) must = >.600 
2. b) Average line for each stanza (oikos) must be between 21 and 34 syllables. 
3. i) (This way our syllables are WEIGHTED rather than absolute.)

7) >.600 repetition rate ideally thrust us into a territory of THIRDS (dactylic/anapestic).

Apophatic Composition

“A fractal is made up of parts similar to the whole in some way.” -Mandelbrot

Sometimes you need to turn things inside-out. When I was a cherubic youth I stridently tried, day after day, wearing a more than worn out UNC Tar Heels baseball cap dawn to dusk, to straighten my hair, so I could have long straight hair like Kurt Cobain. Yet it was never happened for me—my hair, it seems, was destined to grow outward rather than downward. My Anglo classmates were equally fascinated and repulsed. I rescinded into a Hellenistic shell to contemplate my fate, yet even my innate Hellenism, it seemed, was contorted to an imprecise degree. My hair, in short, it seems, (even to this day) remains more horizontally focused than vertically focused, and I never successfully mimicked Kurt Cobain. I also never did heroin.

So it almost goes without saying that when I decided to revive the Jeff's In The Circle, I knew I needed to take a horizontal approach, that continuing to take a vertical approach to musical composition would lead me nowhere, that it would be a subsequent disaster. It would be madness. Sadly, I've never taken much of a break from composing music, yet I've always taken the assumption that music should be composed vertically rather than horizontally, and this assumption has only led me to disastrous locales. 

We don't think of shapes when we think of music, but all I've ever thought of music—when I've thought about music—is shapes. To me, music is nothing but related shapes. Anyone who's ever composed a piece of music has first and foremost, whether they know it or not, thought about the shape of time. 

Is time linear? Should we add to time? Can time be repeated ad infinitum? One, two, three, four? One, two, three four? And so on? It seems to me that most composers in our country (America) seem to believe that time is a linear phenomenon, and that it can be repeated equally, in an ad infinitum fashion.

Personally, I've never thought of time in this way—musically or otherwise, and it's possible I'm in the minority for doing so. Time to me has always seemed more of an intensive process than an extensive process, one that concatenates and echoes, one that explodes and implodes, more than one that bluntly marches on, ad infinitum. Philosopher Christos Yannaras once wrote this sentence, "The unique, dissimilar, and unrepeatable character of each human expression is inevitably obscured or ignored with a view to containing it within the universal terms of objective definitions," and when reading this sentence I essentially thought how Western music, just as Western theology and Western secular atheism, it seemed to me, had never ceased to believe in the POSSIBILITY of repetition. 

Whereas Yannaras and the idea of self-similarity reference the "unique, dissimilar, and unrepeatable character of ... expression" rock music is founded on the opposite belief, this belief that 4 beats can be repeated equally. The only solution to this issue, to a time that explodes and implodes in unequal intervals, and it's already nestled itself in a variety forms of Greek music, is to write fractal music. Music that isn't composed of EQUAL lines but rather SELF-SIMILAR lines; music that isn't random but also isn't stochastic; a sort of apophatic composition. Music that views true repetition as an impossibility.* 

This is what I set out to do, eventually, maybe not intentionally, but instinctively, and eventually I figured out what it was I was doing, to an extent. Clearly, I was just aping Kurt Cobain again, but appropriately horizontally instead of vertically, poorly. Stochastic process: Write fifty four lines of spontaneous prose. Deterministic process: Retrofit said prose to adhere to (3) parameters: (1) >.600 echo rate, (2) 34-55 syllables per line, (3) exactly three lines per section. 

An echo, as in an instance of alliteration or assonance within the line, a series of concatenations that provide an untimed rhythm. An interval of 34 to 55, the 10th interval of the Fibonacci sequence, in order to ensure each line has abundant syllables for an echo to develop into a unique shape (and still be delivered in one breath). Sections of three lines—because three is the magic number. 

The text is sung in a syllabic style, mimicking the modality of the bouzouki taxims of the amanedes, of the Greek Orthodox cantor; the guitar mimics (refracts) the sung text; the bass (keys) provide the drone notes; the drums punctuate.

Theory of Self-Similar Composition

Or: Two Forms of Intervals & Jimothy Prits Pragma Blothworth

Rock music like post-screamo and satanic black metal is fun, but composing it requires us to make a few determinations on the procession of time. 

One way we can look at time is that 1 beat equals 1 beat, and maybe there will be 4 beats per line? Yes. There will be 4 beats per line. And these 4 beats will be divisible into 4 iterations of 1 beat, and 1 beat will always equal 1 beat. Each beat will, true, comprise 25% of the line (1/4=.25), but 1 beat always equals 1 beat. 1=1

So if we were to take this first way of looking at time and map it out numerically, so we can see how our time is progressing, we should make it as simple as possible. Let's multiply everything by 100, so the first beat starts at 100 instead of 1—this will make it easier for us track our progression without resorting to decimal points, which everyone hates. So we start at 100. Each beat is 1 beat, but each beat is a fourth of the line, which is 25% (1/4=.25), so each beat adds 25 to the first beat (which is 100), so the first line looks like this:

100+25+25+25+25, or: 100 then 125 then 150 then 175 then (beginning of second line) 200. We're increasing the line incrementally by 1 beat, which is 25% of the line, but 1 beat always equals the same thing, 1 beat. 1=1. So our first two lines proceed as follows: [100]-125-150-175]-[200]-225-250-275]-[300]...etc, etc

But of course another way we could look at this is that 25% of the line equals 25% of the line. 25%=25%. But how would that look? Any different? Let's start again at the first beat, which we'll start again at 100:

100*(1.25)*(1.25)*(1.25)*(1.25), or: 100 then 125 then 156.25 then 195.3125 then (beginning of second line) 244.1406. When 25% equals 25% our progression, it seems, is no longer distributed in even increments. 1 beat no longer equals 1 beat when 25% equals 25%. Yet, on a mathematical note, when our increments were equal (when 1 beat equaled 1 beat), then our percentages were no longer equal. For example: to get from 100 to 125, you would add 25% (100*1.25=125) to 100. But to get from 125 to 150 you would only add 20% (125*1.20=150)! So 25%=25% then 1 no longer equals 1. But if 1=1 then 25% no longer equals 25%.

So if 25% equals 25% then our first 2 lines look like this: [100-125-156.25-195.3125]-[244.1406]-305.1758-381.4697-476.8372]-[596.0464]. 

We might look at these intervals and say, "Wow those are random ass numbers, dude—way different than 4/4 time!" Yet is this really the case? In our first way of looking at time 1 beat equaled 1 beat, but 25% didn't always equal 25%. In this case 25% equals 25% but 1 beat doesn't always equal 1 beat.

In mathematical jargon we might say that 100 to 125 to 150...(etc, etc) is a way of proceeding extensively, while 100 to 125 to 156.25...(etc, etc) is a way of proceeding intensively. We might say the first way is a strophic (repetitive) approach to composing, while the second way is a self-similar (fractal) approach to composing. 

In conclusion, these are two ways of calculating intervals and thinking about the inexorable procession time while composing music.

On Hypostaticism

Preface to Hypostaticism LP from Dec. 2022

During a period where I was experiencing a sort of personal crisis a particular phrase came to me more or less unannounced—the primary fallacy of our age is the organism—and it came to me as I was writing out, in an admittedly very stream of conscious type of way, a dream I'd recently had where, in a world that was literally falling apart into a sea of magma, I reconnected with my childhood friend Corinne Magno in a particularly weird way. I didn't really understand what this phrase, the organism is the first fallacy, meant at the time, as it's often the case that I never understand phrases like these, phrases that come to me more or less unannounced, almost as if someone is whispering them directly into my ears—no, not until after peeling these phrases apart again and again and reconstructing them in all possible ways do I begin to understand them at all, if at all. So I guess, in retrospect, it wasn't entirely surprising when nearly three years later, in April of 2021, that I woke up from another vivid dream, this time involving an older female I became romantically involved with, who, by contrast, I didn't know, who appeared at first as of sub-Saharan African descent and subsequently of Northern European descent, who, with two small shadow-like beings in the backseat of our car, told me she was finally leaving to go ‘south of the Missouri,’ it was only after waking up from this dream in a particularly panicked state that I was curiously drawn into the direction of the thought of the philosopher Christos Yannaras.

And it was only through my reading of Yannaras and his plethora of obscure (to me) references that I stumbled upon this idea of hypostasis—this peculiar, misunderstood in perhaps the most Romaic of ways, interpretation of being, reminiscent, as Yannaras wisely notes, from certain vantage points of Bell's Theorem. Ironically it was this idea, a true staple of the thought of my direct and recent ancestors, of the religion I was baptized into at birth and more or less completely ignored my entire life that would bring me back to music. Because, eventually, in thinking through these issues again and again, the organism as a first fallacy, this relatively forgotten notion of υπόστασης, it became clear to me that the issue at hand here was an audible one, that it was a question of organizing principles, of how to calculate intervals, that in essence it was a musical problem.

Western composition to this point has generally approached sound as either α mirror of the organism or as the mirror of the dissolution of the organism, almost never through hypostasis, almost never through modes that are directly contradictory and irrational yet still subsumed under an organizing principle. We've vacillated for decades between Schoenberg and Ayler with no in between. We construct our songs in the way we believe we've been constructed as well, as individuated rational entities—almost never as relational irrational orders.

And if we begin to believe our individualism is flawed in concept we flail into pure chaos, discarding everything at once. Yet for my part, for better or worse, I've yet to understand myself in any other way than the sense Yannaras alludes to in his writings, as an ordering of relational irrationalities. And for that reason I've approached this musical problem, this problem of composition, in my own image, as a mirror of my own hypostatic being.

A Note on American Noise (2022)

“But it is also absurd to suppose that two opposites can owe their origin and their beings to the same thing.” - Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names

In America over the last 50 years, as classical or so-called serious music has waned in resonance, there's been a gradual rise of a kind of music often called ‘noise’ that's taken a variety of forms—but usually under the guise of opposing the classical system that's served as the foundation for American music education since the common practice period.

Arguably, Hard Bop ushered in Free Jazz which ushered in Punk which ushered in Metal which ushered in Hip-Hop (with the caveat that a lot of the genres were subterranean and concurrent), all of which at one point or another, through various subgenres, stood in nominal opposition to this classical model. For a variety of reasons those movements either failed to or simply lost interest in this opposition, leaving so-called noise music as the perhaps purest alleged opposition to the classical model.

However, this note will argue, perhaps polemically and perhaps unconvincingly, that the American conception of noise to date has been slightly ill-advised, that the vast majority of American music that’s been deemed noise is, in fact, anything but noise. Because the American conception of noise has generally hinged on two principles: (1) lack of structure (i.e. free improvisation) and/or (2) lack of sensory discernment (i.e. harsh noise) in both its definition and its alleged opposition.

This note, by contrast, will argue that noise by definition can be neither of those, that both discrimination of tone and structural complexity are necessary for noise to exist, that noise, in order to oppose the classical model, must operate monadically instead of dualistically. Admittedly, perceptually, this may seem odd—it may seem as though we’re suggesting that sounds that are still perceptible essentially lack being?

Noise is both local and impermanent; physicists tell us ‘noise’ can't be physically distinguished from ‘desired sound.’ A feedback loop or a truly chance sequence of tones don't oppose the classical model because they don't oppose anything; this is the fundamental misinterpretation of chaos we have in America as it relates to noise. Pure chaos, although perceptible (or illusory), lacks being. In a monadic ontology non-being can’t oppose being. Therefore, chaos opposes nothing. Whereas the classical model is essentially dualist, our antithetical noise model should be appropriately monadic. There are no strict opposites in a monadic model; it's absurd that two opposites should emerge from the same substance (Dionysius). As such noise opposes the classical model not as duality but as a partial antithesis, a falling-short-of, a structured deviation that falls short of pure chaos (non-being).

With this in mind we can define contemporary American noise by (3) characteristics acting in concert with one another:

1. Relational discrimination of tone
2. Structural complexity
3. Meaningful deviation from the classical model

On Harmony: A Brief Note (2022)

My view on harmony is a metaphysical and a mathematical one. Basically harmony presupposes the absolute essence of tone, that the tone, say, middle C is essentially no different than the number 2. But, influenced by Berkeley, I've made this point previously: the number 2 is indistinguishable from the number 1.99 repeating; we can't say for certain whether we have 2 apples or 1.99 repeating apples or even 1.9999999999999 apples. That is: integer is a fiction, a product of the mind, in the words of Berkeley, it has no absolute essence, it's a crude approximation of an infinite spectrum. Similarly with tone, middle C is nothing more than the frequency 261.63, but what's to prevent us from confusing 261.63 with 261.63333339 or 261.63 repeating? It's beyond the scope of our sense perception, hence there are many, perhaps infinite, functional middle Cs (261.63, 261.633333339, 261.63 repeating, 261.63334, 261.63333333338, etc), hence middle C has no absolute essence.

Harmony is built upon the foundational idea that tones can be combined in static aggregates. The C chord of C major is always CEG. For CEG to remain the same in all instances then C, E, and G must have an absolute essence. If C, E, and G are just crude approximations of an infinite spectrum then harmony is a farcical idea.

I mean, that's probably a little over the top, but a little exaggeration never hurt anyone. My point is that a single complex line of music, as found in the Byzantine, Arabic, and other traditions, isn't as has often been accused, steeped in some kind of primitive simplicity or oriental backwardness. No, it's founded on the lack of absolute essence of tone. In fact, the entirety of Byzantine metaphysics is steeped in this type of relational essence or relational ontology. This is the primary foundation of the musical concept Hypostaticism.

The 11 Tone Hypostatic Scale & American Individualism

Strictly speaking there is no me. While I'm signing this note as ‘Nikos Nassafa’, which is a derivation of a name of an entity I look in the mirror and may say ‘Haha, this is me’, a name ‘I’m’ referenced as legally, but that entity is in a static sense nonexistent. The extent you read this and construct a perception of a ‘Nikos Nassafa’, sure, that act of constructing a perception maybe, in some sense, gets added to some larger ‘Nikos Nassafa’ abstraction that in some sense ‘exists’. But that abstraction is perpetually edited to the degree it doesn't exist in the sense we think of ‘individual’ (at least not to me!).

The same can be said of tone. 

Middle C is perceived and enacted in infinite ways. It exists in the same sense as an ‘I’ exists. Even in a physical sense—the physical location of middle C at 261.63 Hz has infinite derivations that are imperceptible to our world. 261.6301 and 261.63 and 261.63001 and 261.63000001 and 261.6300000001 and so on are all indistinguishable to us, although in some sense, purely mathematically speaking, we’d have to assign them independent individualities.

The 11 tone hypostatic scale is comprised of 5 maqams — and it's performed in a way that's meant to reflect this interpretation of individuality, as a perpetually altered fiction, each maqam takes on an existence that’s perpetually shifting in relation to one another, yet that relation inevitably constructs the eleven note hypostatic scale, yet that scale has no existence beyond the perpetually shifting relational nature of the five maqams.

(A brief digression: I’m using the term ‘maqam’, although that’s not entirely accurate. The five scales are actually dromoi, or roads, derived from rebetika, but those scales were originally approximations of maqams that are/were A) used in Ottoman (and Arabic) classical music, and B) are also very closely related (in some cases identical) to the Byzantine Octoechoes. However true maqams and echoes, in most cases, don’t adhere to 12TET, so the rebetika roads approximate said maqams so they can, you know, be played on a tetrachordo buzuki or electric guitar.)

In any case, notes are, for one, placed in a place of indeterminacy by the dual courses of the three-course electric guitar. Secondly they're made indeterminate by a rapid combination and recombination of each maqam within the larger scale. Each indeterminate note refracts off of itself into adjacent indeterminate notes, creating a monophonic form of harmony.

Improvisation Doesn't Exist

When writing his official opinion on improvisation free jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock said the only time he felt he was playing total bullshit was when played in Europe without a rhythm section, or in other words when he played in a ‘free’ style, but without a tonal center. By the same token, people accused Jack Kerouac, in his pursuit of Spontaneous Prose, of fundamentally misunderstanding jazz, because the writing of prose as a single line of text, unless you were to get exceptionally metaphoric about paper, also essentially lacked a rhythm section to improvise over. So even in his refined spontaneity Kerouac essentially bastardized the true nature of jazz.

Yet while I’ll agree that a good amount of so-called ‘free improvisation’ is total bullshit, and while I’ll also agree that Kerouac probably wasn’t completely up to date on his reading of Schoenberg, I’ll have to respectfully disagree with Sharrock in the opinion that he was playing bullshit because he lacked a rhythm section, that improvisation is inadequate sans a tonal center, and I’ll also have to disagree with the critics that believe Kerouac didn’t, even if it was through his own ignorance, create a profound form of unorthodox Jazz music on the page.

But then again I’m (in some abstract and false sense) 'Greek', which is a word I think Charlemagne coined to describe the Hellenic-speaking medieval Romans of the Eastern Mediterranean who he viewed as inauthentic as well as arrhythmic, which means I grew up attending liturgies, listening to very extended melismas that, if they were barbarically Westernized, were only performed over a single drone, as opposed to the true way of performing these melismas, which was totally solo. 

So a single line of extended, non-tempered improvisation that lacks a traditional tonal center, while apparently totally barbaric to even free jazz musicians like Sharrock, is something that apparently inveterately appeals to me? Yet being American I admittedly also initially approached these Greek cantors with suspicion; why was my priest canting the vocal equivalent of a death metal guitar solo? And why did the English translations sound like an off-beat precursor to Future’s entire discography?

Jazz, as the hub of improvisation in America, even on its fringes has for some reason remained glued to a pretty Eurocentric view of tonality. I can think of some reasons why …

But then again, I don’t know, maybe Eurocentric harmonic concepts is where Jazz belongs? It seems a little counterintuitive, yet I suppose it’s possible. Coleman attempted to formalize a non-Western Harmolodics, which was notably extended in practice by Ulmer but not many others? Cecil Taylor maybe did more in practice for so-called atonal Eastern-tinged improvisations with his solo piano concerts, which to my ear sound a lot like extended taqsims.

In any case, the history of the Byzantine chant’s extended melismas (which to be fair eventually became at least partially notated) (or the taqsims of Ottoman and Arabic classical music) are rooted in what we in America would inevitably call solo improvisation. Which is clearly barbaric.

But at least in the Byzantine case improvisation was probably an inaccurate description of the technique, as these melismas weren’t explicitly emanating from the cantor, the cantor was viewed more as a conduit, as the melismas were, in a sense, the cantor becoming one with the corporeal energies of God, the word of God modulating via melisma. 

By contrast, the Eurocentric model of improvisation, which is the traditional jazz interpretation of improvisation, is slightly more secular, taking a man-made tonal center, a man-made tempered scale (as opposed to a by the ear microtonal vocal scale), and consists of rational individuals using honed techniques to consciously act spontaneously around these tonal centers in unison.

Eurocentric harmonic concepts led to an American improvisation that, perhaps fittingly, was about connecting with your fellow man. The ‘Greeks’, by contrast, were improvising to become hybrid deities. 

So Kerouac, in his own ignorance, created a form of spontaneity that would, at least theoretically, be more at home in a Greek Orthodox church than a jazz cafe. 

But to me, I don’t know … they’re all jazz? In the sense that the best jazz transcends Eurocentric harmonic secularisms and enters a zone where improvisation is no longer apropos.  

The Mechanics of the Hypostatic Scale