Fab Prefab

As you may already know, prefabricated houses are the wave of the future. Should home ownership ever be within my realm of financial possibility, I’ll be sure to investigate them in greater depth, but for the moment my interest in prefabs has mainly to do with the way they’re put together: A number of complicated individual parts are constructed separately, then joined together in affordable, energy-efficient architectural polygamy.

This approach is also viable for assembling a piece of music. I don’t mean writing independent passages of music and stringing them together as sections of a larger piece, but rather the independent construction and eventual collation of compositional materials so heterogeneous that their development requires the exercise of widely differing compositional mentalities. This model may be especially suited to working in new media, fields in which time-tested modes of composing may not be possible or practical.

For example, I’m now in the early stages of composing a piece for a performer who will wear a wireless motion-tracking system. According to the “prefabricated house method,” I decided to break the project down into component tasks that will ultimately be fitted into one another, rendering (I hope) a completed work. These tasks include constructing a MAX patch to facilitate the motion-tracker’s control, writing a length of four-voice counterpoint that will provide the harmonic material for the piece, recording and processing numerous audio samples in the studio based on the counterpoint, inventing a suitable motion notation (motation? nobody better steal that neologism), and actually notating the movements that will comprise the performance.

Of course, analogous compositional plans have been used since the Middle Ages, long before prefabricated houses appeared on the market. By the same token, some of my favorite instrumental pieces of the last 25 years were written this way, although my crude simplification doesn’t do them justice. I wonder if its application in new media composition will later be considered a temporary place-holder until we arrive at a more immanent way of working with these emerging tools and ideas–indeed, maybe some of us have already evolved such a conceptualization.