* 3-12-2003

One of the things I want to do in this project is explore the dream or
surreal narrative.  We imagine a wakeful narrative as a story in a
traditional structure.  Each part of the story is consistent with the
other parts. A wakeful narrative has a beginning, middle, and end.
There is a setting, characters, and some kind of conflict which
unfolds through the course of the story.

In a dream narrative, at first thought, it seems that anything goes.
Our dreams do not appear to have any structural constraints.  Of
course, there are recurring dreams which one individual may have
several times.  There are also common dreams such as "actor's
nightmares" or dreams of falling from high places.  It also seems that
if a dream wakes us from sleep, it is telling our wakeful
consciousness something important.  But to make generalizations about
the structure of exposition in dream narratives seems impossible.

While dreams have no top level structure, they do have low level
structures.  If you imagine a large complicated wakeful narrative,
each action between characters in the narrative is motion toward the
conclusion, in a more or less well defined line.  Once we reach the
conclusion, we can work backward and know how all of the exposition in
the story led to it.  Each unit of exposition is linked to another.

In a dream narrative, there is a similar linkage of units of
exposition, which is low level structure.  The difference is that the
top level structure is obscured or weak, except for dreams that wake
us up, which move us into a state of mind that is more receptive to a
wakeful narrative.

For example, here is a wakeful narrative.  Three bears leave their
dinner to cool.  A young girl steals their dinner, and the bears
return and eat the young girl instead.

There is a low level linkage.  The dinner is too hot to eat,
therefore, three bears leave it to cool.  The absence of the bears
leaves the dinner vulnerable, therefore, a young girl is able to sneak
in and eat it.  The bears return, and are still hungry, so they eat
the girl.  There is also a top level structure.  Each of these actions
lead toward the girls demise.  There are surreal components to this
narrative, but the nature of the narrative is wakeful.  For example,
real bears don't actually heat their food, the story personifies them.
We can interpret the top level structure as an example of justice or
vengeance.  That those who dispense the terrible justice are
personified animals may be interpreted as a subconscious message.
Similarly, the fact that a young girl, traditionally symbols of
innocence, is the culprit, is subject to a process like dream
analysis.  The characters are symbolic, poetic, and surreal, but the
narrative structure is wakeful.

Here is a dream narrative.  A man and his wife prepare to eat.  The
food on the table is all white, and made of air.  The man looks under
the table, and sees himself with a chain and a whip.  In horror, he
begins to move backward into the house he grew up in.

Each action in this narrative is linked to the next, yet the overall
story doesn't make sense to our awake consciousness.  Several top
level structures are actually present at once.  Some might obscure
some others, like words written one on top of the other.  Some might
be partially formed, and knit together at the edges with poorly
related others.  Some might relate well, but in deep unknowable
ways. You can not write such a story without revealing important
non-verbal or subconscious aspects of yourself.  That is the domain of
this project.

It is my hope that mythological narratives, stories of universal
importance, can be discovered through dream narratives.  We can tell
stories from our own lives.  The universal stories, or mythological
narratives, I am guessing, can only be found through less wakeful
conscious thought.  Otherwise they would all be plain to us already,
and it's not clear to me that there are even a finite number of them.

* 3-15-2003 Score rules regarding setting transitions.

The dream narrative developing for this project has distinct recurring
settings.  So far, these include the city park, the dinner table, and
outer space.  Setting change cues are text chunks beginning with the
word "in".  Setting change cues should linger.  They should all last
equally long, 10 seconds seems about right.  Setting change cues
prompt sounds that strongly indicate a transition.  So, for example, a
cue of "in the city park" should be answered with a transition to the
city park ambient sound of at most 10 seconds, and the city park
ambient sound should then continue until the next setting change cue.

The actual sonic representation for a setting should be an ambient
sound that sustains until the next setting changes cue.  It must
distinguish itself clearly form other settings, although it may sound
related.  For example, while a "dinner table" setting must sound easily
distinguishable from a "kitchen" setting, the dinner table ambient
sound might include distanced sound elements from the kitchen
ambience.  Here "ambient sound" means a persistent sonic condition that
does not demand attention. You should be able to enter the ambience at
any point in its duration and identify it as such, then quickly lose
the ability to focus on it. To achieve distinct ambient sound, think
about "chunking" of the qualities of a sound (ex. pitter patter,
thunder and scratching, tempo division, pattern modulation, lawn
sprinkler sound) instead of usual music dualities (ex. loud vrs. soft,
high vrs. low, left vrs. right, consonance vrs. dissonance).  Sound
design dualities (ex. near vrs. far, clean vrs. distorted, fat
vrs. thin) might be used sparingly.

The cues must allow the ambience of a setting to linger for at least
20 seconds after the transition cue finishes.  Otherwise there will
not be enough of the ambience in the short term memory of the listener
for a return to that ambience to be remembered.  A player may choose
the ambience, but may not change it dur ing the course of the
performance.  A listener must be able to recall it throughout.  It is
something a performer may prepare far in advance of the performance.

The initial setting/ambience might be one which is conducive to
dreaming and imagination.  The wakeful mind might be sent into
inattention by white noise to m ask the sounds coming in from outside
the venue, bass drone to sooth the sense of touch, and or other
hypnotic sounds.  This might be done after the dream nar rative ends
as well.

* 3-16-2003

There is obviously a continuum of possibilities between wakeful
narrative and dream narrative.  It's not modal.

In early drafts, there was a character "the Crocodile".  I have felt
the need to make this character less specific, as if a Crocodile no
longer means to me what it once did. I renamed it "the Devourer",
which centers upon the main aspect of a Crocodile that I needed to.
I'm not sure if this is acceptable.  In a dream it would appear as a
crocodile and the dreamer (if the dream was remembered) would have to
determine that the devouring property of the crocodile had the
semantic load.  I think I just find the word "crocodile" unsuitable as
it appears as text; childish somehow.  This is a difficult issue.

* 4-17-2003 Unpredictable Indeterminacy

I would like to now engage in the ultimate hubris of comparing myself
as a composer to John Cage. John Cage wrote;

  "Down in Greensboro, North Carolina, David Tudor and I gave an
  interesting program.  We played five pieces three times each.  They
  were the Klavierstuck XI by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff's
  Duo for Pianists, Morton Feldman's Intermission #6, Earle Brown's 4
  Systems, and my Variations.  All of these pieces are composed in
  various ways that have in common indeterminacy of performance.  Each
  performance is unique, as interesting to the composers and
  performers as to the audience.  Everyone, in fact, that is, becomes
  a listener.  I explained all this to the audience before the musical
  program began.  I pointed out that one is accustomed to thinking of
  a piece of music as an object suitable for understanding and
  subsequent evaluation, but that here the situation was quite other.
  These pieces, I said, are not objects, but processes, essentially
  purposeless.  Naturally, then, I had to explain the purpose of
  having something be purposeless.  I said that sounds were just
  sounds, and that if they weren't just sounds that we would (I was of
  course using the editorial we) -- we would do something about it in
  the next composition.  I said that since the sounds were sounds,
  this gave people hearing them the chance to be people, centered
  within themselves, where they actually are, not off artificially in
  the distance as they are accustomed to be, trying to figure out what
  is being said by some artist by means of sounds.  Finally I said
  that the purpose of this purposeless music would be achieved if
  people learned to listen.  That when they listened they might
  discover that they preferred the sounds of everyday life to the ones
  they would presently hear in the musical program.  That that was all
  right as far as I was concerned."

I think that the "purposeful purposeless" discussed here is one of
Cage's misapprehensions of Zen. We learn a lot from his mistakes.

I would like to point out some differences between that process and
mine. Cage uses chance operations to make a composition with
indeterminacy.  This theoretically robs the piece of any purpose,
subconscious or otherwise.  I do not use chance operations.  I might
use pseudo-random operations if any of the possible outcomes is as
interesting as any other, but repeating one thing is less interesting
than not.  What is more similar to a chance operation for me is the
unpredictable nature of my control surface.  For example, if I am
using a panel of knobs, I will not be able to hear in my mind what the
result of turning any particular knob will be, until I actually turn
it.  I can in some cases make a pretty good guess.  Turning a knob a
little might give some idea of what turning the knob more will do.
There i s a testing process that goes on.  Some of the testing process
is subconscious.

Of course, I am interested in enriching the sound with as much
subconscious purpose as possible, so basing a composition upon pure
chance is not something I would do.  

This departure from traditional instrumentation seems important to me,
but I have not reached a full understanding of its implications.