Systems music

Everyone who has ever learnt a musical instrument will know the experience.  You come across a tune or chord sequence of such aching beauty, of such compositional inevitability, that your heart misses a beat.  You play it again, looking for the following phrase which will turn it into a composition, and you into a composer.  To help things on their way, you play it again; and again.  Until finally, with frustration then resignation, you recognise that you are trapped in à prison of your own making which is perfect but minuscule.

Systems composers love that prison. They do not long for endless vistas, for the organic development which characterises most other forms of music.  They are content to dwell on a phrase, to linger and to extract from the simplest material the last drop of music.  Theirs is a music of eternal adolescence.  Which explains its origins, growth and current success.
 
In its spurning of traditional goal-directed processes, its delight in the moment, and in its love of the small-scale and simple, it shows its roots in the Sixties.  It is no accident that the extreme minimalism and aleatoricism of John Cage were originally close in spirit, if not technique, to the later systems composers.  Some, like Terry Riley, straddle both worlds.  Steve Reich may have proceeded from different principles - those of phasing, and a study of rhythm - but he shows a similarly non-Western approach to the whole business of music-making.

As systems music - rather than music of the minimalist or experimentalist school - found itself, so the characteristics which are familiar today emerged.  Since it was mainly concerned with the most basic building blocks like chords and scales, the idiom became almost exclusively tonal.  Within that idiom, some composers turned their systems music into an investigation of just one element - for example, Philip Glass, most of whose earlier music consists of constantly repeated arpeggios and nothing else.  The momentum is derived from the constant repetition, and the swirling figurations which articulate the underlying arpeggios.

Perhaps the most talented practitioner of the younger generation is John Adams.  His music moves beyond the common-ground of tonality into subtle classical cross-referencing.  He draws not only on the strength of the basic musical system, but of the masterpieces which have been written in it.  For example, his Grand Pianola Music constantly evokes the magisterial presence of Beethoven, particularly in the piano writing of the Emperor Concerto.  The arpeggios are no longer neutral powerhouses as with Glass, but are themselves charged by potent cultural memories.

As music which is largely adolescent in impulse, it is no surprise that the world of systems has proved highly popular with non-classical audiences.  Its use of basic elements makes it immediately accessible; the constant repetition is in any case very similar to the riff-based structures of pop music.  But above all its goal is the same: it tries and often succeeds in reproducing that unforgettable first experience of music's force and magic in all its freshness.  And despite the name, to do that requires more than a mere system.
 
(9.8.86)

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