Music is Math
The mathematician and philosopher Leibniz once said that ‘the pleasure we gain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.’ Leibniz was writing in the late 17th century, of course, and about a far more rudimentary set of musical and rhythmical rules, but I think the statement holds, and I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that the intense, elaborate, plural pleasure music provides is merely a function of numbers, of counting. With two long exploratory tracks on Return Written Arrange (and an ‘Anneterlude’), Daniel WJ Mackenzie has explicitly approached this subject by partly basing the structural makeup of the tracks on the Fibonacci sequence – that simple, elegant sequence in which subsequent numbers are based on the sum of the previous two (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc); but rather than simply leave his investigations there, he’s chosen to complicate matters by introducing the chaos of chance in the form of a nod towards aleatory music.
I wasn’t hugely familiar with the term aleatoric with regards to music, but a cursory read around suggests it’s been with us for at least as long as the 15th century (so pre dear old Gottfried). The word comes from the Latin for dice – alea – and refers to the fact that certain aspects of a composition are left to chance and accident. The idea of chance and indeterminacy in music composition isn’t, of course, a new one, and was used extensively by Cage, Pierre Boulez and Stockhausen in the mid part of the 20th century, and has provided Brian Eno with ample distraction in the latter half, but I’m not aware of it being so openly referenced in a piece of electronic music in recent years.
To facilitate this – on the face of it – odd rubbing together of ideas, Mackenzie (who, I should probably say at this point, is probably better known for making murky, expansive drone music under the pseudonym of Ekca Liena) commissioned various musicians (including Jannick Schou, Ihor Dawidiuk, Dave Hamilton-Smith and Anne Hennies) to produce short sections of music based on pitches and durations of his choosing, which he then placed together in the order in which they were returned to him. These sections were then phased in accordance with the Fibonacci sequence and left to play out to conclusion.
I think the key to my thinking about what Daniel WJ Mackenzie has done here is directly concerned with how I feel about Leibniz’s statement and how, if at all, it reflects and impinges on the music involved. Put more bluntly: does it matter? Which is to say, if I had the time, maybe (and it’s a big maybe) I could pick apart these intricate structures and locate the joins, the deep patternings, but I’m not sure what it would reveal, or that it would matter? What would you be left with? It’s why I think Leibniz is probably wrong, or at least mostly wrong. I’m also reminded of DH Lawrence’s ‘The Third Thing’:
Water is H20, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one
But there is also a third thing, that makes it water
And nobody knows what that is
It’s this third thing in which the magic resides; and for me, the pleasure of music comes from immersion and ecstasy (in the original sense of ‘standing outside oneself’) in this third thing, whatever that might be. And discussions of technique aside, on Return Written Arrange Mackenzie has ‘created’ some near-amniotic atmospheres.
It’s all done with an understated simplicity that belies the overheated explanations above, which may, again, be the point. On ‘Return Written Arrange I’ Mackenzie accumulates layers of detail, creating a webbing effect of intricate interwoven rhythmic clusters – the overall effect is surprisingly visual, or more precisely, architectural. ‘Return Written Arrange II’ is vast and encompassing, a tomb of sound. It’s particularly engrossing and affecting with its simple warm lower synth pulses (extending to drones) and dappling of high ringing tones. It’s a long track (close to 17 minutes), but it’s so enveloping, and unspools with such grace and drama, that the duration is rendered almost obsolete as a locatory factor. Which does return you to the original statement of Leibniz’s in some obscure fashion, and may well, after all, be the point: mathematics employed as an opiate, inducing a state from which you might emerge via unconscious counting…
Return Written Arrange is complicated by the presence of four other tracks, interspersed between the tracks discussed above and all bearing the acronym ‘N.A.C.A.L.’, named after a line in a poem by the elusive Irish poet Patricia Scanlan: ‘now all colours are lost’ (nb – it isn’t the Patricia Scanlan you’ll turn up if you google her name. Shudder). These tracks have a more sombre, elegiac quality and ostensibly suffer from the theoretical and structural weight that surrounds them – and the thought does present itself that the whole enterprise might have worked as a single tight document of an experimental process. That said this interleaving of ideas isn’t as disastrous as it might have been and the act of blending works as a kind of aural buffer zone.
The final point to be made about Return Written Arrange is that none of this would matter if it wasn’t as engaging as it was; and no listener would suffer from a lack of knowledge of the methods used in its construction, or the theoretical apparatus that surrounds it. Which is to say that it stands or falls on its quality, and it has plenty. Get to counting.
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