Synecdoche

“The mission of art lies neither in fleeing from, nor in flirting with, the contradictions which mould the consciousness of our society, but in coming to grips with them and dialectically mastering them.”

Theodor W. Adorno

Within American experimental music, structural frameworks allowing indeterminacy redefine music as an emergent process rather than a determinate object, not by evading contradiction, but by internalizing it within compositional systems themselves. These systems do not contrive accidents, but rather observe contingent outcomes and incorporate them as integral components of the compositional process. The final project embodies these principles through strict constraints and fractal design, enabling interacting processes to unfold and develop over time. Its development draws direct inspiration from three works studied in the ‘composition as method’ unit: John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis, and Samuel Beckett’s Lessness.

The project represents a synthesis of structural ideas drawn from each course topic, implemented through programming and realized using SuperCollider instruments. Musical structure was defined in Python through SCAMP, a Python - based package that provides tools for algorithmic music composition, scheduling, and performance. Within SCAMP, compositional rules and parameters were specified and then transmitted to SuperCollider, where they triggered instrumental sound processes. This programming - based approach established a rigid structural framework while allowing the SuperCollider instruments to behave indeterminately within those constraints.

The aim of this project is to embody principles of American experimental music discussed in class, and articulated by Theodor W. Adorno, by establishing strict compositional parameters that guide indeterminacy in a way that allows meaning to emerge. The presence of rigid structural constraints does not abdicate compositional responsibility, rather, it disciplines indeterminacy, permitting open outcomes while preserving precise aesthetic intent. Indeterminacy is therefore not a surrender to chance, an uncritical ‘letting things happen,’  but a curated condition through which each element is shaped to guide the work’s expressive and structural trajectory.

As such, the use of SCAMP establishes a determinate structural framework capable of producing indeterminate outcomes, generating contingent interactions between instruments. This system internalizes contradiction by embedding it directly into the form: outcomes are decided through system design rather than expressive narration, separating structural logic from event - level content and shifting composer agency from the act of writing notes to the design of conditions. The project adopts a Cagean separation of fixed structure and variable realization while retaining compositional responsibility through tightly bound parameter profiles that shape how contingency may appear.

Lecture on Nothing provided the fractal design underlying the project, specifically the square root system, which informs both the macro structure and internal subdivisions of the project. Cage’s lecture articulates a fundamental sound/silence dichotomy, though its realization is confined to the singular presence of an individual speaking voice. As a result, its formal process operates primarily through the evocative alternation between sound and silence. By adopting the square root system while expanding the instrumentation to three independent voices, the project retains this sound/silence continuity while enabling incidental interactions between instruments to emerge through structural design. The form consists of 36 measures with instrument 1 [7, 5, 13, 11] and instrument 2 [5, 4, 11, 11, 5] segmenting the form as per the rules dictated by Cage, while instrument 3 follows the golden ratio to allow naturalistic development that increase duration over time. Superimposing these divisions on top of each other yields moments of silence and cacophony punctuated by distinct instrumental articulations.

Atlas Eclipticalis provided a visual model for organizing pitch material in a non-linear manner while maintaining notational clarity and compositional intent. Cage locates freedom primarily at the level of performance: the performer determines stave register, microtonal inflection, and, to an extent, pitch realization itself. Constraint emerges through systemic limits, most notably the avoidance of pitch repetition through the use of numerical indications to govern duration, density, and fixed pitch locations. My project redistributes these roles of freedom and constraint, retaining fixed pitch locations, while allowing freedom through the permutation and reordering of these pitches from a determined set of pitch class collections over time. Rather than performer - driven indeterminacy, variability is embedded within the compositional process itself, allowing outcomes to emerge through internal recombination rather than interpretive choice.

Samuel Beckett’s Lessness provided a model for combinatorial organization governed by permutation under strict constraint. The text is constructed from a fixed set of sentences, each repeated an equal number of times and reordered according to a predetermined combinatorial system. While the semantic content remains static, meaning emerges through the changing relationships between sentences as they are recombined across the work. The result is a form in which contingency arises not from expressive choice, but from the interaction of rigid structural rules. This principle directly informs the syntactic logic of the project. Rather than introducing new material through developmental transformation, the work operates on a closed set of pitch collections that share ontological similarity. Distinct relationships between these collections emerge through recombination, allowing the soundscape to be continuously recontextualized over time in a manner analogous to Beckett’s use of fragmentary phrases, where an overall aesthetic identity is preserved despite constant recombination.

Like Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, combinatorial practices in Lessness unfold along a single linear thread. While this approach is effective in a literary context, it risks becoming perceptually static when translated directly into instrumental music. A parallel issue emerges with the macro structure of Lessness in structuring paragraphs allowing an aesthetic segmentation between sections, but not an audible or measured delineation. Silences between paragraphs do not have the same structural support that Cage’s Lectures on Nothing does. The inclusion of three independent instruments addresses the former limitation in allowing both vertical and horizontal combinatorial relationships to occur. The latter is resolved by formatting the structure of Lecture on Nothing rather than Samuel Beckett’s paragraph - based organization, allowing temporal segmentation to be governed by a clearly articulated formal system rather than implied textual boundaries.

When combined with the square root form derived from Lecture on Nothing and the pitch-field logic inspired by Atlas Eclipticalis, Beckett’s combinatorial strategy completes a system in which form, pitch, and temporal ordering are governed by parallel processes of constraint. Indeterminacy is therefore not introduced as an external aesthetic gesture, but as a structural consequence of the system’s design. The music unfolds as a process of observation: the composer defines conditions, and the work reveals their outcomes over time.

The pitch material of the project was derived using the complement union property in which the addition of a fixed dyad to multiple tetrachords yields distinct hexachordal aggregates. These dyads were selected to represent each interval class and, when taken collectively, approximate a complete chromatic field. For each dyad, tetrachords were chosen within the same interval - class category in order to preserve hexachordal continuity across the horizontal dimension of the score. No tetrachord is repeated within a given section, either horizontally or vertically, ensuring local non - redundancy while maintaining systemic coherence. 

The hexachords were related through measurements of intervallic weight, resulting in the pitch collections 6 - 5 <422232>, 6 - 18 <322242>, 6 - 7 <420243>, and 6 - Z6 <421242>. Tetrachords were determined by their Kh relationship to their respective hexachord, ensuring structural compatibility between subset and aggregate. The Kh relationship is symmetric, as evident from the reciprocal complement relation and provides an inner syntax continuity. This emphasis on internal syntactic logic enables large-scale material continuity without reliance on motivic transformation. Vertical relationships in each category were determined by register, dyad - type, and articulation/texture. Articulations/textures were distinct to each category and are glissando, chordal, staccato, tremolo, pointillistic, and sustain. These were chosen based on the register of each vertical pitch group for timbral considerations. 

To further differentiate pitch groups, notes that remained invariant both horizontally and vertically were redistributed across distinct octave registers.The total number of pitch collections used was 22 rather than 24, as hexachord 6 - 7 contains no minor - third intervallic relationships between pitches. Consequently, one pitch group was removed both in order to remain faithful to Beckett’s use of each sentence and to retain the Kh continuity for each tetrachord; the macro - structure of the final project therefore consists of 22 sound events. Staying true to the form of Beckett’s Lessness, the project mirrors itself in the latter half reversing course and recontextualizing pitch group relationships and the sound/silence dichotomy. The 22 pitch collections are consequently re - randomized and reordered for a total of 44 sound events.

Using these constraints, the system assigns each instrument a Boolean on/off state that gates sound according to its macro - structural timeline. Pitch groups, organized by category and articulation, are pooled into a single repository from which each instrument draws one group per sound event. Each selection is logged to track cumulative usage, and the chosen group is removed from the pool to prevent repetition, ensuring that pitch content evolves through exhaustive, non - redundant traversal. At the level of individual pitch realization, this constraint is relaxed: notes within a selected group may repeat freely during a sound event, rather than being exhausted after a single occurrence. The resulting instructions are transmitted to SuperCollider by converting MIDI data into OSC messages and routing them to the SuperCollider listening port, where the three instruments are triggered.

Instrument 1, woodHit, is a struck “woody body” model in which a brief noise impulse excites a bank of resonant modes, analogous to a simplified marimba or woodblock body. Resonance is implemented using DynKlank, a modal resonator bank that accepts a list of resonant frequencies and causes them to ring in response to the excitation signal. The frequency multipliers [1, 2.05, 2.9, 4.3] approximate the inharmonic modal spacing of real wooden objects, producing a timbral profile closer to a bar or block than to string or air driven resonators. Instrument 2, metalHit, employs the same modal synthesis framework as woodHit but is re - tuned to emulate a thin, bright, inharmonic metal sheet. This is achieved through altered frequency ratios, decay behavior, and spectral emphasis, yielding a more brittle, sustained resonance characteristic of metallic surfaces. Instrument 3, clSound, is designed to emulate a clarinet - like timbre using sine waves restricted to odd partials with progressively decreasing amplitudes, producing a hollow, nasal spectral profile. Subtle white-noise components are incorporated to suggest air turbulence and breath noise, reinforcing the instrumental reference without literal modeling.

This project realizes indeterminacy as a constrained, system - internal phenomenon. Macro - form is fixed through precomposed active/rest durations for each instrument and a hard total - duration cutoff, while the microstructure emerges through stochastic selection of pitch pools, event types, durations, dynamics, and chordal behavior within tightly bound parameter profiles. Because the three instrumental processes unfold concurrently, the work produces incidental alignments and interactions, collisions, overlaps, and emergent textures that are not composed note - by - note but arise from the imposed structure. In this way, contingency is not staged as an ‘accident’ but observed as an outcome of the system, and contradiction is internalized as the persistent tension between strict formal control and variable realization.

The title Synecdoche refers to a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa. This title is apt for this project in mapping cleanly onto what the program accomplishes: pitch groups act as partial realizations, individual events stand in for a larger formal logic, local interactions imply the global system, and the overall fixed structure manifests only through contingent outcomes; the listener never hears the system directly, but rather encounters fragments that imply it.