Process Music - History

History

Although today often used synonymously with minimalism, the term predates the appearance of this style by at least twenty years. Elliott Carter, for example, used the word "process" to describe the complex compositional shapes he began using around 1944 (Edwards 1971, 90–91; Brandt 1974, 27–28), with works like the Piano Sonata and First String Quartet, and continues to use down to the present time. Carter came to his conception of music as process from Alfred North Whitehead's "principle of organism", and particularly from his 1929 book, Process and Reality (Bernard 1995, 649–50).

Michael Nyman has stated that "the origins of this minimal process music lie in serialism" (Nyman 1974, 119). Kyle Gann (1987) also sees many similarities between serialism and minimalism, and Herman Sabbe (1977, 68–73) has demonstrated how process music functions in the early serial works of the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts, especially in his electronic compositions Nr. 4, met dode tonen (1952) and Nr. 5, met zuivere tonen (1953). Elsewhere, Sabbe (1981, 18–21) makes a similar demonstration for Kreuzspiel (1951) by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Stockhausen composed several instrumental works which he called "process compositions", in which symbols including plus, minus, and equal signs are used to indicate successive transformations of sounds which are unspecified or unforeseeable by the composer. They specify "how sounds are to be changed or imitated rather than what they are to be" (Griffiths 2001). In these compositions, "structure is a system of invariants; these invariants are not substances but relations.… Stockhausen's Process Planning is structural analysis in reversed time-direction. Composition as abstraction, as generalization. Analysis of reality before its entry into existence" (Fritsch 1979, 114–15). These works include Plus-Minus (1963), Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen, and Spiral (both 1968), and led to the verbally described processes of the intuitive music compositions in the cycles Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Für kommende Zeiten (1968–71) (Kohl 1978 and 1981; Hopp 1998).

György Ligeti's Poème symphonique (1962), in which a hundred metronomes are set to different tempos and allowed to run down, is another notable example.

The term Process Music (in the minimalist sense) was coined by composer Steve Reich in his 1968 manifesto entitled "Music as a Gradual Process" in which he very carefully yet briefly described the entire concept including such definitions as phasing and the use of phrases in composing or creating this music, as well as his ideas as to its purpose and a brief history of his discovery of it.

A number of Steve Reich's early works are examples of this form of process music, particularly a specific process called phasing. In his 1968 work Pendulum Music, a number of microphones are connected to a number of loudspeakers, and each is allowed to swing freely above the loudspeaker it is connected to until it is still—the feedback that results from this process, as each microphone passes above its loudspeaker, makes up the music.

Process music can also be created using relatively traditional instrumental techniques—Reich's Piano Phase is an example. James Tenney is another composer who is concerned with process, such as in his tribute to Steve Reich, Chromatic Canon, in which a tone row is eventually built up, one note at a time, from what started as a repeated open fifth, before returning by the same path.

For Reich it was important that the processes be audible: "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.… What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing" (Reich 2002, 34). This has not necessarily been the case for other composers, however. Reich himself points to John Cage as an example of a composer who used compositional processes that could not be heard when the piece was performed (Reich 2002, 34). The postminimalist David Lang is another composer who does not want people to hear the process he uses to build a piece of music (Brown 2010, 181).

Within the field of popular music, process music made its strongest early appearance in the ambient works of Brian Eno, notably his first foray into the genre, Discreet Music. On several of the tracks of this album, musicians were instructed to play a small section of Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D major in different ways. On one piece, for instance, musicians played the section at different speeds, the speed determined purely by the pitch of the instrument used. Thus the bass instruments played the section at a slower rate than the treble instruments, and the new piece created was shaped by these melodic lines drifting in and out of phase with each other.