Page 156 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Musicological perspectives on composing 145

“Sinfonia”, I wondered whether the arrangement in layers conceived for
“LipsEarsAssNoseBoobs” might not have been inspired by Berio’s third
movement, in particular since there are parallels in the way it was realised. In
the “Sinfonia”, the scherzo from Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 2” forms
an underground or background current that flows through the whole movement,
at times closer to the surface, at times more in the depths. Ciciliani’slayered
cover versions fulfil a similar function. Ciciliani, however, rejects this con-
nection: “No, I wasn’t conscious of it. I don’t think that Berio’s piece influ-
enced me subconsciously either, although I obviously can’t be certain about
that.” Here, he gets to the heart of the great difficulty of trying to fathom
decision-making processes. Finally, his decision to use a layering technique
does not have to have stemmed from a specific stimulus at all. After all, the
technique plays an important formal role in various segments of New Music
in general (see Holzer 2011: 493ff.).
Ciciliani finally made up the layers by overlapping more than two dozen
cover versions, which had been transformed and ordered into a circle of fifths
(see Figure 4.6). The actual overlap (for instance, the A minor area takes up
more space than the preceding D minor area) was not the result of structural
or proportional organisation, but of a trying-out of sequences. Ciciliani then
worked on the sound carpet in a similar way – first using reverb variations,
which he found unsatisfactory, then spectral freezes (the “freezing” of certain
frequencies and amplitudes), which ultimately gave him the desired sonic
effects. This shows that many actions carried out during composing are pre-
cisely not determined by a succession of planning-and-implementation or
decision-and-implementation. Rather, decisions are always made during the
carrying-out of actions. By operating the reverb effects and spectral freezes,
the composer created proving grounds which acted as successful laboratories.
They could also lead to unforeseen constellations, thus giving the composing
process a different direction.
Even at this advanced stage of the work’s genesis, however, it was still not a
case of merely transforming the conceptual level into a musical one. Rather,
the composer had the feeling that “it was still somehow not enough”– hence
the idea of including the realm of plastic surgery. And only this can really be
regarded as the beginning of the composition: a beginning shaped by a ver-
sion of the song “Gloomy Sunday” transposed into a major scale, the whole
backed by an advertisement text for plastic surgery (the choice of A flat major
as the work’s key was taken entirely pragmatically because it was a pitch the
violinist found easy to sing) (see Figure 4.7).
Given this, it would be inappropriate to employ the usual means of musi-
cological analysis in an attempt to investigate the musical structures in more
detail. For the composer, it is clearly about more than the communicative
potential that can emerge from the combination of the song transformation
and text. How this potential is used depends on the associative capacity of its
listeners. Do they know the song, and possibly even the history of how it was
received? Obviously, this does not mean that the structural or formal musical