Open form (music)

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Open form is a term that is primarily used to describe works of art from the fields of literature, the visual arts and music whose formal conception has moved away from conventional notions of a "closed form" and renounced it. In the field of musical composition, this means "works with a variable external shape". These are compositions whose elements or parts are interchangeable in their sequence and where arbitrary interpretations have taken the place of a linear and purposeful course. From the point of view of art history, a standard work by Heinrich Wölfflin should be mentioned above all , in which the term for the analysis of the style development of modern art is introduced, while in literary studies Volker Klotz introduced the pair of opposites of open and closed form for the interpretation of dramas from different epochs (1960). The Italian philosopher and writer Umberto Eco , who in his work Opera aperta described the idea of ​​interpretive plurality as a phenomenon of works of art, paved the way for further dissemination and conceptual clarification . At the seal u. a. by James Joyce, Eco exemplified a thought that, in a figurative sense, is of central importance for performing and listening to music: each recipient contributes his or her own contribution to the meaningfulness of a literary text by not accepting it as a given and, in a sense, "passively" tries to understand, but gives it its special meaning through its personal interpretation.

features

In the music sector, it was Konrad Boehmer who initiated the discussion about the concept of "open form" and discussed it on the basis of key works of 20th century music. However, he came to the conclusion that "the collective term open form , under which mobility, variability, ambiguity and other very different principles are combined, only pretends form." In contrast to improvised music , however , where the sonic result consists of more or less random events, in the works of the Open Form a certain framework is defined for a multitude of possible processes, so that - as with a mobile by Alexander Calder - seemingly result in an infinite number of different appearances of the same raw material. The identity of the respective work does not consist in its individual sound sequence, but in the overall conception of all different possibilities. Since chance plays a major role here, there is a conceptual and content-related proximity to so-called "aleatoric music" . When performing such compositions, the performer was given completely new and previously unknown skills. While the interpreter in the classical sense behaved like a servant to the work of art and tried to achieve a representation as true to the score as possible, he is now authorized by the composer to intervene in the form and playing time of a work and to make far-reaching decisions about how the work should be at the moment sounded. It does not seem to be a coincidence that such design principles came into vogue in the arts at a time when a modern and less rigid social concept began to emerge with the 1968 movement . So one can see the new understanding of the interpreter's role in the socio-political sense in connection with the model of an anti-authoritarian and "open society" as developed by Karl Popper .

About history

prehistory

Examples of music, the shape of which can be described as "open" in the above-mentioned sense, have existed in the West since the late Middle Ages. These are initially only large molds, the individual parts of which are put together by the executors at their own discretion depending on the occasion and occasion. Examples of this can be found in the practice of minstrels putting together several dance movements to form suites , with improvisation also playing a major role. In the sacred area, too, there are plenty of examples of a liberal composition of smaller, self-contained pieces of music that are only regulated by the liturgical context. According to Böhmer, the form only became "open" in the narrower sense with the Missa Prolationum by Reinassance master Johannes Ockeghem . The ambiguity, experimentally composed in this work, is "an expression of the first comprehensive intervention of a compositional idea in the structure of the material." In this context it should be noted that the idea of ​​a musical composition as an original work of art created by a named composer can only be established late in Western history and is tied to the artist's self-image that emerged there. In this last-mentioned sense, the idea of ​​a work of art has also become a prerequisite for musical "classical music" . This resulted in a standardization and textbook-like canonicalization of the musical forms, which from then on were regarded as "fixed" forms. The sonata form is probably the best example of this. Such a paralysis in formal thinking meant that playful minds such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were able to invent something like "Instructions for composing waltzes using two dice" .

After 1945

In the middle of the 20th century there was a remarkable development in terms of the opening up of "fixed" forms and their liberation from normative constraints. The most famous protagonists in this country were Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez . The high level of awareness of their compositions, which are declared as "Open Form" (see below), goes back to the Darmstadt Summer Courses , where both presented and discussed their novel form models (1957, 1958); on the other hand, it is probably also the result of a musical historiography oriented towards progress and continuity, which interprets the open form as a consistent further development of serial music . Phenomenologically, however, it can be established that as early as 1935 the American composer Henry Cowell , guided by ideas of an elastic form , in his 3rd string quartet Mosaic had left the interpreter in the order of the movements at will, and that the American composer Morton Feldman 1953 with Intermission 6 had created a work for one or two pianos in which 15 fragments are distributed on a single sheet of music with the stipulation that they can be arranged as desired: “The composition begins with some sound and continues with some other”. In close proximity to this, other composers in the USA experimented with the open form, whereby quite comparable results were achieved despite a fundamentally different starting point. John Cage intended to let his personal role as the author of a composition take a back seat and to strengthen the interpreter's autonomy. Based on works such as Music of Changes (1951) and 4'33 ″ (1952), he developed scores in which the interpreter, like a "co-composer", has to make many important decisions regarding the sound realization. The piano part of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957/58) already points in this direction. The score of the whole work consists of 63 single sheets, of which any selection can be played in any combination, also with regard to the number and types of "orchestral" instruments. The artist's own creative contribution is even greater in the graphic score by Fontana Mix (1958), which consists of ten pages each with six differently curved lines and ten transparent foils with freely arranged points. From this work there is a direct route to Variations I (1958) by John Cage. - How great the influence of the principle of mobiles developed by Alexander Calder was on the development of open formal processes in music is clearer from any other composer than from Earle Brown . Created in 1953, his Twenty Five Pages for one to 25 pianos are subject to an openness in the form for which Brown introduced the term "mobile compositions" . The order of the individual pages of this work is left to the interpreter as well as the decision in which reading direction the sheet is on the instrument. A maximum and a minimum performance duration are given for each stave, with a free choice of tempo. "I don't believe in the ultimate best form [...] I prefer, however, to base the work and its formal future on the direct and spontaneous reactions that occur to the conductor in relation to the composed basic material," says Brown in the With regard to the Available Forms II for large orchestra (1962). After a number of other similar compositions, Brown wrote the Calder Piece for four percussionists in close collaboration with Calder , whose actions were controlled by a specially designed mobile instead of a conductor (1966).

In the mid-1950s, Karlheinz Stockhausen had also begun to break with the ideas of musical form that had been valid until then, and instead of the purposefulness of classic-romantic forms, "where I know that I will get from A to B", a type tries to set it, which he described as a "variable" form in contrast to the term "open form", which has meanwhile become a fixed term in the USA . At the same time, Pierre Boulez also presented pieces in which the sound source material allows an almost infinite number of possible forms. In his Third Piano Sonata (1955-57), for example, he offered the interpreter a larger number of shorter sections, which the player had to follow certain "rules of the game" when combining them. In the so far most comprehensive presentation of the compositional facts of this "key work", Manfred Stahnke points out the problems of the analytical penetration of the particles in their large formal context. In 1956 Stockhausen's piano piece XI was composed , which consists of a single sheet of music on which there are 19 "groups" that the pianist has to combine in a "way that depends on the eye." Both Boulez and Stockhausen are formal concepts that can be compared with a city map, on which all routes are graphically precisely recognizable, where the respective starting and destination points and above all the choice of routes are determined by the user himself . Stockhausen's cycle for a percussionist from 1959 is much more developed in terms of the congruence of the sound material to be played and its formal expansion . It consists of 16 written sheets attached to the side of a spiral. As in the most famous example from literature, the "Livre" by Stéphane Mallarmé, there is neither a beginning nor an end. The player can start with anywhere on any side, but then plays the entire cycle in the given order. He can also turn the book upside down and read the music as a mirror image. And the freedoms granted to the performer go even further in that there are several strands on each side, where the drummer has to choose one or the other solution. The paradox of this composition is that the greatest possible indeterminacy of what is sounding is integrated into the greatest possible cohesion of form: the performance ends at the moment when the player has played all sides and has come back to his starting point.

A few weeks after the world premiere in New York (April 1957), Stockhausen's Piano Piece XI was performed as part of the Darmstadt Summer Course, as well as the world premiere of a core movement from Boulez's 3rd Piano Sonata (Darmstadt 1958) quickly made the rounds and had a striking license for any arrangement of otherwise firmly attached molded parts like a start signal for other composers. The Polish composer Roman Haubenstock-Ramati felt inspired to write a score called Mobile for Shekespeare for voice and six instrumentalists (1960). Similar to Brown, this was preceded by the experience of Alexander Calder's works of art, whereby it should be noted that Haubenstock-Ramati basically has a great affinity for visual art and often put his musical ideas on paper in the form of musical graphics . The saying goes down from him: “The most beautiful are the puzzles that allow different solutions.” Performances of works such as Jeux II - Mobile for two percussionists (1966) or Miroirs - Mobile for 16 pianists (1984/91) are primarily improvised actions by the performers. According to the composer, his miroirs represent "the extreme limit of a mobile, potentially containing all possible variants, all mirroring and mirroring of the given material, which in this way becomes a new form - which is closed and open at the same time a new form of music, which I understood and called the "principle of the dynamically closed form". "

Klaus Hinrich Stahmer "Mobile Actions" (excerpt)

The pieces of music, which are formally organized in this sense, can also be interpreted as labyrinths . Like in a maze , conductors and musicians find themselves repeatedly faced with decisions about which section to play next when Klaus Hinrich Stahmer performed Mobile Actions for String Orchestra (1974) . Most of the pages can be easily connected to each other. For example, at the end of page 9 (see fig.) The symbol of the open, i.e. H. numberless square gives players the way to any other side. Other connection information such as B. the number 6 on the left side of the picture, however, are binding and lead - if the players decide to change at this point - to specific work sections. Incidentally, wrong paths are also built in, which arise from the fact that they lead to points where only a return to the change point just left is possible. In a performance it can happen that not all sections are heard, because there is neither a fixed starting point nor a clear goal. According to the laws of stochastics , however, it turns out that despite all the randomness of the form organism that is sounding, there is a not unlimited number of possible constellations.

There are parallels to graphically notated pieces of music with regard to the indeterminacy of the tonal events and the freedoms that the composer grants and allows the interpreter to realize in the realization of such compositions . Such "musical graphics" designed according to criteria of visual art require a high degree of imagination and artistic personal responsibility from the player in the implementation of the pictorial designs, whereby the boundaries to music pieces with "open form" are fluid. It is no coincidence that the first attempts at musical graphics came from the aforementioned Earle Brown , whose sheets November '52 and December '52 are among the most famous examples of this genre. The Sette Fogli (1959) by the Italian Sylvano Bussotti are no less original in terms of graphic quality .

The fact that the process of breaking open the unity of musical forms also has a socially critical component can be clearly seen in a form experiment by the composer Mauricio Kagel . In his roughly 100-minute work Staatstheater (1971), he dismantled an opera evening on all levels and instead offered "a nine-part catalog of isolated or rudimentarily linked opera elements that - hardly accompanied by restrictive directives - may be selected, combined and ranked." Kagel's compositional thinking appears here as "detached from the traditional concept of the score". "Kagel composes with initially isolated, then aleatorically reassembled set pieces from operatic history" and "in the reorganization of the traditional has gone to the limits of what can still be realized in traditional musical institutions." By making all theater elements, including the reception behavior of the opera visitors, available, the opera audience experiences something completely new. In what is probably the most revolutionary work in opera history of the 20th century, the principle of open forms is taken out of its internal musical context and experienced by the opera visitor as a socially critical moment of de-hierarchization.

As shown above, there were two centers in which "open form" music was experimented with: New York (Cowell, Cage, Feldman, Brown) and Darmstadt (Stockhausen, Boulez). The works of the American composers met with open ears in Germany. Here it can be observed that the euphoria with which the liberation from the canon of tried and tested forms was greeted bears traces of a will to break new ground and a new beginning. In the discussion, which was held primarily in Darmstadt, critical voices not only mingled from among the reactionaries. The musicologist Carl Dahlhaus , who is fundamentally open to all innovations in contemporary music, pointed out that a concert-goer cannot hear and understand the openness of the musical form at all. In contrast to the experience of looking at one of Calder's mobiles, in music the "variable form on paper" during the performance becomes a "fixed" process, as a result of which "the variability is aesthetically a fiction". A few years later it became even clearer and asserted that the turn to open forms was nothing more than an "embarrassment" "which the concept of form causes the theorists of the latest music, an embarrassment that the expression 'open form' betrays rather than alleviates . " As a final résumé, his argumentation is to be interpreted, according to which "composing - under the heading of 'open form' or 'work in progress' - has become a process" in which it is less about isolatable results in the form of completed works than about Conceptions arrived ", and the interest that such pieces of music had found can be traced back to the fact that they merely" provoked a continuation of musical thought through unsolved difficulties "when the difficulties had actually been solved. In general, it can be observed that the composers' interest in "open" forms has noticeably decreased since the 1980s, which suggests that it was more about experimental design approaches and prototypes than the invention of an infinitely reproducible model .

literature

  • Clemens Kühn: Form. In: Music in the past and present. Material part Volume 3 (there in particular Chapter VII Dissolution and Restoration ), Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 1995, ISBN 3-7618-1100-4 , pp. 607–643.
  • Christoph von Blumröder: Open form. In: Concise dictionary of musical terminology. Loose-leaf edition. 12. Delivery. Steiner, Stuttgart 1984/85. (Reprint also in: Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Ed.): Terminology of the Music of the 20th Century. (= Concise Dictionary of Musical Terminology. Special Volume I). Steiner, Stuttgart 1995)

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph von Blumröder: Open form. In: Concise dictionary of musical terminology. 12. Delivery. Steiner, Wiesbaden 1984/85.
  2. ↑ Heinrich Wölfflin: Art-historical basic concepts: The problem of style development in modern art . Bruckmann, Munich 1915, DNB 364051590 . ( 2nd edition 1917 online )
  3. ↑ Volker Klotz: Closed and open form in drama . Hanser, Munich 1960. (14th edition. 1999, ISBN 3-446-12027-0 )
  4. ^ Umberto Eco: Opera aperta. Bompiani, Milan 1962. (German: The open work of art. Translated by Günter Memmert. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1973)
  5. ↑ Konrad Boehmer: On the theory of the open form in new music. Tonos, Darmstadt 1967, p. 5.
  6. ^ Karl R. Popper: The open society and its enemies [The Open Society and Its Enemies] . Part 1: The Spell of Plato . Routledge, London 1945. (German: Plato's magic . Francke Verlag, Munich 1957)
  7. ↑ Konrad Boehmer: On the theory of the open form in new music. Tonos, Darmstadt 1967, p. 9 ff.
  8. ↑ Konrad Boehmer: On the theory of the open form in new music. Tonos, Darmstadt 1967, p. 22.
  9. ^ Nicole V. Gagné: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music. Scarecrow, Washington DC 2011, p. 85.
  10. ↑ Hans Emons: Complicity: on the relationship between music and art in American modernity. In: Art, Music and Theater Studies. Volume 2, Frank & Timme, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-86596-106-1 , p. 87.
  11. ↑ Earle Brown: Foreword to the score Available Forms II ; quoted from: Hans Vogt: New Music since 1945. Reclam, Stuttgart 1972, p. 300.
  12. ^ Karlheinz Stockhausen: Texts on Music 1970–1977. Volume IV, DuMont, Cologne 1978, p. 578.
  13. ^ Manfred Stahnke: Structure and Aesthetics in Boulez. Wagner, Hamburg 1979. (2nd revised edition. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2017)
  14. ^ Karlheinz Stockhausen: Texts on his own works, on the art of others, current issues. Volume II, Cologne 1964, p. 69.
  15. ↑ Quoted from an obituary for the Roman-Haubenstock by Josef Herbort, in: Die ZEIT. 11/1994.
  16. ^ Roman Haubenstock-Ramati in: Foreword to the score Miroirs. Universal Edition, Vienna undated
  17. ^ Klaus Hinrich Stahmer: Mobile actions. Verlag Neue Musik, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-7333-1927-4 .
  18. ↑ Erik Fischer: On the problem of the opera structure - The artistic system and its crisis in the 20th century. (= Archive for Musicology. Volume XX). Steiner, Wiesbaden 1982, p. 178.
  19. ↑ Thomas Kuchlbauer: Composing with actors, cups, tables, omnibuses and oboes - Mauricio Kagel's cross-material and delimiting composition process in "State Theater". In: SYN (magazine for theater, film and media studies). 12/2016, p. 42.
  20. ^ Rudolf Frisius: Hearing and Seeing - Visible Music; This side and that of the opera: hearing and seeing as unresolved conflict situations. seen on November 3, 2017.
  21. ↑ Carl Dahlhaus, in: Form in der Neue Musik. (= Darmstadt Contributions to New Music. Volume X). Mainz 1966, p. 74.
  22. ^ Carl Dahlhaus: About open and latent traditions in the latest music. In: The new music and the tradition. (= Publications of the Institute for New Music and Music Education Darmstadt. Volume XIX). Mainz 1978, p. 17.
  23. ↑ Carl Dahlhaus: The crisis of the experiment. In: Composing Today. (= Publications of the Institute for New Music and Music Education Darmstadt. Volume XXIII). Mainz 1983, p. 83.