To Know Robert Morris's MA

TO KNOW ROBERT MORRIS’S MA WAYNE SLAWSON HIS IS A TALE OF FASCINATION, sloth, and redemption. It’s about Robert Morris’s MA and starts when he sent me a cassette tape of the piece shortly after it was composed in the early 1990s. My fascination was aroused then, and I remain fascinated. But I had trouble with the piece. After repeated hearings, I couldn’t follow it very well. It was as if the details were too varied and coming too thick and fast to hear how they added up on a medium or large scale. When I listened again after a day or two, my attention would wander at about the point where it had before. I could remember the very beginning, but not a whole lot more. I was in the paradoxical position, it seemed, of needing some parsing of the music into medium-scale units in order to remember the sonic details that made up those units. Here’s where sloth set in. I had been listening during long commutes and failed to put in the quality time and attention that my fascination told me the piece deserved. Other things intervened, and I ended up setting aside MA for a number of years. The beginnings of T 360 Perspectives of New Music redemption came in 2009 when Morris suggested that Yank Gulch Music publish a CD of his talk, “Lecture on MA.”1 Preparation of the CD confirmed my fascination and awakened a determination to get to know the piece well. Sloth lasted a bit longer, but in 2013 redemption got underway. “Lecture on MA” tells us a lot about the piece. It is based on the twelve pitch-class series, CC#FF#EBAbGADBbEb, or , and its duration is about 16.5 minutes. Its compositional design is made up of a total of 423 pitch-class aggregates formed from three versions of a 77-aggregate, all-partition pitch-class array, and multiple 4×4 and 8×8 arrays. The durations allocated to the aggregates range from a maximum of 42 seconds down to fractions of a second. The timbres of the piece are electronically synthesized, with time envelopes and spectrum types that often resemble those of acoustic instruments. A prominent characteristic, which gives the piece its name, is a series of eighteen extended pauses called “ma’s” that are distributed throughout the piece. The ma’s themselves total two minutes and sixteen seconds, leaving a bit over fourteen minutes for the setting of the pitch-class design itself. 2 KNOWING AND MEMORY First, a word about my title: There are many ways “to know” a piece of music. I wanted my knowledge to arise mostly from listening, without detailed analysis and, largely, without following a score. I had listened to Morris’s “Lecture . . .” repeatedly, had studied his compositional designs, and owned a study score. But after taking up the present study in 2013, I referred to these aids sparingly—mainly to confirm my hearing of pitches in certain passages. And “knowing” itself comes in various flavors. One can “recognize” passages, as in “I’ve heard that before.” Some passages seem to “reference” or be “associated with” other passages.3 Away from any sound, it is possible to “recollect” music in one’s mind’s ear. When listening to passages, or recollecting them in silence, one may be able to “anticipate” what’s coming next. These ways of knowing range roughly from easy to hard. When I returned to MA in 2013, I found that I recognized some passages, and, after a while, noticed some associations among them. But I could recollect only a few passages, mostly near the beginning, and could anticipate very little with accuracy.4 The difficulties in knowing MA in these ways must have to do with memory. Is it an issue of memory overload? The statistics reviewed To Know Robert Morris’s MA 361 above certainly imply high temporal densities. But speed alone doesn’t necessarily challenge memory. Much tonal music, for instance, is very fast, but nevertheless graspable with little effort. Composers and theorists know—and many other experienced listeners sense—that the underlying grammar of chord...