Various Meditations on Musical Composition

by NICK NASSAFA

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.

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