A Piece of Music is Only a Piece of Music

A Piece of Music is Only a Piece of Music

By Frank J. Oteri
I’ve always thought of music as more analogous to painting than sculpture, but I’m beginning to think the opposite might be true.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

I’ve always thought of music as more analogous to painting than sculpture. The processes of painting and sculpting are diametrically opposed from a conceptual point of view. On a very basic physical level, painting has traditionally been an art form that resulted from adding something to a tabula rasa, e.g. applying oils or acrylics to a blank surface such as a wall or a canvas—ultimately a process of addition. Sculpture, on the other hand, evolved from chiseling away at something until it became an aesthetically satisfying object—a process of subtraction.

Of course, in the 20th century, these roles got rather jumbled, as did just about everything else anyone ever took for granted, and we realized that “tabulas rasa” are never completely “rasa” and that things could not only be added to or subtracted from but multiplied, divided, and manipulated an infinite number of other ways. But for me, composing music—whether putting notes on a page or dropping them from a pull down menu on a computer screen—has remained primarily an act of adding something to nothing.

Now I’m beginning to think the opposite might be true. In my own music I’ve realized that it is only when I am able to apply specific limit-inducing parameters to sound—e.g. remove all the extraneous ideas that are inevitably always there—that something I am proud of can emerge. And in fact when you ask listeners to pay attention specifically to your own music aren’t you asking them to turn off all other potential sonic stimulation? In essence you’re actually limiting their sonic landscape, at least to some degree, which reveals the act of making music to be akin to the subtractive process of traditional sculpture.

It is semantically revelatory that works of music have so long been called “pieces of music.” Despite the late romantic composers professing that they were creating a universe through their music, music is already itself a universe unto itself and no piece of music could ever contain all of it. When we engage in acts of creating music we are only ever able to carve out an extremely small slice of what music ultimately is, even if that slice is Wagner’s Ring. (This is yet another reason this term is much better than the ubiquitous malapropistic use of the word “song”.)

Perhaps if we started thinking of our “pieces of music” as small parts of a much larger ongoing sonic cosmos, we’d finally recover from the masterpiece syndrome. Not only does masterpiece reverence hinder the reception of new music among audiences longing for the approved tried and true, masterpiece anxiety stifles the urge to create for fear that what we are creating isn’t the best and biggest thing ever to come down the highway.