Systems music

Systems music is a type of minimalist music particular to British experimental music, in which 'the note-to-note procedure' is determined numerically (as defined by Christopher Hobbs). Systems music is one of the distinctive ways in which British experimental music retains elements of experimentalism in the postmodern soundworld.

Systems music developed as a part of 'machine processes', developed by John White. Machine processes typically had a repetitive structure generated by random processes (dart boards, random number tables, chess moves). A typical 'Machine piece' of this genre is White's Drinking and Hooting Machine (1968), in which each player performs by blowing over the top of a bottle of 'a favoured drink', then altering the tone of the bottle by taking sips, swigs, or gulps from the drink (or leaving it alone) from a table of numbers obtained through random processes.

A form of systems is the 'found system', preferred by Hobbs, in his work Aran (1971), in which a knitting pattern for an Aran sweater, with its different stitches, determines the pitches chosen and the instruments to play them, and in his recent series of pieces called Sudoku Music (2005-6), using 'super' or 'mega' sudoku puzzles having a hexadecimal (16 x 16) grid.

The Hobbs-White Duo performed what could be called 'classic' or strict systems, particularly in their percussion music, in which various permutations of durations or of instruments were observed rigorously. Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton also performed as a systemic percussion duo. Parsons' systems for piano often focused on alternations and permutations of distinct intervals. The piano duo of Dave Smith and John Lewis also worked in some systems in the 1970s, Lewis in terms of reggae and other popular music influences. Smith has used permutations in his titles, often of funny anagrams, but he has occasionally used systemic processes.

Michael Nyman also worked with repetitive systems. In his earliest work he often used structures either borrowed from or influenced by West Coast and other minimalism only with a particularly English sensibility in his choiice of musical material. Waltz in F, for instance, uses a structure akin to Terry Riley's In C, but the musical material is that of almost-clichéd waltz figurations. It was Nyman's work as a critic as well as his status as one of the best-known British experimental composers that the term 'systems' became used in the 1980s as a generic term for all minimalism. Since then it has erroneously been considered to be an archaic term for minimalism, even though systemic composition is still ongoing in Britain.

In the 1980s, much of the numerical systems work was applied in early computer music (as in White's series of electronic symphonies) or for early electronic and MIDI keyboards (Hobbs' Back Seat Album has one movement in which the completion of a permutation is celebrated by a rising electronic figuration). Although most British experimentalists use other types of generation - mostly eclectic, through-composed, often tonal work using surprising juxtapositions of references and of modulation - many use larger-form systems occasionally, if they no longer use the strict note-to-note systems. Hobbs' Fifty in Two-Thousand (2000) is typical, in that large blocks of distinct melodic sections with varying instrumentation are arranged and repeated according to a permutational structure.