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| Compactionist Schematic |
Compactionist Music
A Word on "Compaction Music" Last year, I led a roundtable lecture on Laboratorie New Music composer’s reductionist pieces titled the “Compaction Series." With the compaction musics, each piece is typically under 20 seconds and are appropriations of existing works coupled with the composers original work compressed to varying degrees associated with strict rules and guidelines.
Generally the pieces, while titled, also include the precise time in each title (“A Flutter Pressure Drop” 7.90445802″). With Compaction Music there is an invitation to listen with an awareness of the construction, an alertness in the background of the experience.
Compactionist Composers are an exclusive challenge-society, a think-tank that seeks to generate pseudo-constraints; these constraints spur the private musical ambitions of its members, and subvert the aesthetic traditions of composition.
Some works of this group are front-loaded, with the constraint or device announced in tandem with the debut of the score—this allows the act of reading to be textured with an editorial or fact-checker’s spectatorship.
In some Compactions, the constraint is not made explicit, which allows the act of performing to be infused with a cryptographic undercurrent, a puzzler’s inquiry.
"Applied Geomancy"
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A Commentary by Martin Amis, 2022
In "Do Not Trouble Your Appetite About It", the score is an insurrection, a riotous sprawl of notation for the harpsichord that veers off the beaten path into a thicket of complexity. This isn't music you simply perform; it's music you grapple with, music that wraps around your cerebral cortex and gives it a good tickle.
The notational archetype here isn't just off the wall—it's off the charts. Each graphic, each glyph on the page, stands coherent in its own microcosmic right. Yet, stack them, layer them, collage them, and what you get is not so much a composition as a compositional conspiracy. It's an enigma, and to the uninitiated, it's as decipherable as Etruscan.
You see, our virtuoso, our Harpsichordist with a capital H, is compelled to make peace with a musical tapestry that's both meticulously ordered and deliriously deranged. The composition, with its Machiavellian complexity, proffers an illusion of chaos, a sleight of hand that tickles the performer into a complicit dance with its apparently nonsensical logic.
This piece is an affront, a challenge to the performer to don the mantle of a musical detective, searching for clues in a notational landscape that seems as random as a drunkard's walk but is, in fact, as precise as a cat burglar. "Do Not Trouble Your Appetite About It" isn't just a title; it's a warning, a cheeky nod to the futility of trying to impose conventional wisdom on a piece that is anything but conventional.
The notational elements, the machinic and graphic shenanigans of the score, are not the headliners. No, they're the cunning accomplices, the rogue elements that lure you into the labyrinth. But the labyrinth is where the action is. It's in the complex interplay, the sum that's more bombastic, more flamboyant than its parts.
And yet, the performer gets it—on some level that transcends the rational, the frontal lobe. The Harpsichordist understands that the joy of this furball of a piece is not in the untangling but in the tangling itself. The complexity doesn't want to be solved; it wants to be savored, like a good wine or a bad habit.
Don't misunderstand—this isn't randomness. This isn't throwing paint at a wall and calling it art. There's method in the madness, a method dictated by the inherent rules of choice and arrangement. The performer's familiarity with these rules is what keeps them from visual fatigue. It's what sustains the engagement, the same way a seasoned gambler remains at the poker table, reading the tells, playing the bluffs, savoring the game beneath the game.
In the end, "Do Not Trouble Your Appetite About It" is a kind of musical maelstrom, one that sucks you in and spits you out, leaving you a little dazed, perhaps, but with a grin on your face. It's a score that doesn't just sit on the music stand; it leaps off it and takes you on a ride you didn't know you wanted to go on.
And that, my friends, is the mark of something remarkable.
- Martin Amis, 2022
