Around this time of the semester, many first-semester students start getting itchy to make what they can’t help but refer to as “normal”/”real”/”good” music (they usually mean “familiar” or “comfortable”). When we started the class, I explained that we’re temporarily setting aside:

1. Non-musical things like intelligible words, recognizable sounds, and danceability (things that speak to other parts of our brains/bodies than the purely musical parts and distract from the pure musicality) and
2. Structures-become-crutches like time signatures and key signatures (things that should be descriptive, to analyzemusic, but end up prescriptive, sterile formulas for making new music)

This is so we can rediscover musicality in its most raw form and return to familiar music with new ears. We’re not here for you to learn how to make better hamburger/driving/doing laundry music—that ability will naturally improve once you’ve focused on the pure musicality of your work.

We end up working with a narrow slice of even electroacoustic art music. The simplest assumption by students is that melodies and beats aren’t allowed at all, but that’s not so. They’re just risky because they easily allow us to rely on non-musical things instead of building our musicality.

Reflect a moment on the pieces we’ve studied so far:

• The contour of melodic motives and counterpoint built from quasi-pitched voices in Yuasa, Projection Esemplastic For White Noise (1964) are key points in the piece.
• The repeating and then rising pitch patterns of the “orchestra hit”-like sounds in Wishart, Tongues of Fire (1993) have a significant role in moving the piece forward, as well as the accelerating pulses.
• Westerkamp, Cricket Voice (1987) uses some almost-recognizeable sounds—frankly, I think that distraction makes it harder to analyze its musical elements even though it is usually considered the most accessible piece of the ones from the analysis projects.
• Deck of Cards (2012) builds tension over time by stacking up chords (given pitches by resonant filters).
• Hit the Deck (2012) uses three pitches and a stable metric rhythm at times to evoke a sense of confident, energetic, focus, in contrast with the mayhem depicted when we are knocked out of those moments of focus.

Now is the point where most students just becoming mature enough musically to start using melodies and beats in expressive, dynamic ways, but I need to see that it’s not an “all or nothing” situation. You can organize events in line with a recurring pulse, use various forms of accent to suggest a hierarchy among the pulses (e.g., downbeats, backbeats, etc.), but you don’t have to set it and leave it like striped wallpaper (there’s nothing wrong with striped wallpaper, but you’d have a hard time passing it off as your own painting). The clarity of the pulses and hierarchy can come in and out of focus, become more stable or less stable, change and lead to new moments or stay the same and cultivate moments of stasis; that hierarchy can shift, as can the number of beats, the tempo, the time scope at which we hear the “main beat” (“is it a fast 1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 or a medium 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – ?”). And when you build those structures—just enough to suggest the pattern—then play with them, you can use them to build and resolve tension, move the music forward, make it an active, compelling contribution to the music.

Peter Klingelhofer’s composition, “Antarctica” appears to have a steady pulse when it’s noticeable at all, but there are also several free-floating moments. Accent patterns on the pulses suggest hierarchies at times, but they are fleeting; they allow foot tapping at times but elude counting “1-2-3-4-” for very long before that pattern gets overturned. At times it sounds like multiple layers of time are overlapping, each with their own pulse and metric hierarchy, strong within itself but different from the others (like the moments with the truncated female voice and the reversed male voice). It keeps our pattern-recognition machines (our brains!) thinking. These techniques use time in musically expressive ways, not just as wallpaper.