Blues in Natural Time
Blues in Natural Time is the second of my Rhythm Etudes for solo violin, which for me are exercises in organizing, perceiving, and generating rhythm. Blues in Natural Time uses a concept which I dubbed, surprisingly enough, "natural time". The idea of natural time came as a response to various temporal signifiers in music which I felt to be overly arbitrary. In particular, I was troubled by the usage of precise numbers of seconds to denote durations in certain pieces. Now, the use of seconds, or metronome markings, or any other precise standard of measuring time is not in itself overly arbitrary: if the composer feels that a particular sonic event should last a particular duration, they should indicate that duration through whatever means they consider most appropriate, and this can include specifying some precise number of seconds. However, I must note that the number of seconds, or minutes, or microfortnights specified is in itself irrelevant to the listener. Nevertheless, in works such as George Crumb's Black Angels, many durational units are chosen for their numerological significance, and there are many notes and rests with indicated durations of 7 or 13 seconds1. Now, I have no problem with incorporating numerological elements into a work, and there are many other audible musical (and linguistic) ways in which the numbers 7 and 13 are reflected in Black Angels. However, to the listener, a note lasting 7 seconds is not 7 of anything. For the most part, durations are only meaningful relative to one another; seven seconds is "some amount of time," while 13 seconds is "a longer amount of time, about twice as long as the first". In fact, due to our usually fuzzy perception of time, the listener may in fact decide that the 13-second note is meant to be exactly twice as long as the 7-second note, even though one of the most fascinating (to me) things about the use of 7 and 13 as recurring elements is that 13 is 1 less than twice 7. Seconds are arbitrary units, and absolute measurements in arbitrary units can't hold meaning in and of themselves.
But nearly all standards of measuring duration that we have are arbitrary. Seconds are arbitrary, and metronome markings rely on the minute, which is also arbitrary. The only non-arbitrary standards of time that we have are either too large or too small to be musically useful: the day and the year2, the decay of various particles, the frequency of various well-defined wavelengths of light3. However, there are at least two common durational signifiers which are musically useful, readily perceivable, and not arbitrarily defined: our heartbeat and breath. Now, these are not standards of measuring time: two people will have different pulse and breathing rates, and even for a single person, both pulse and breathing rate fluctuate greatly over time. But the heartbeat and breath are common to all listeners, and their cadences are easily recognizable to all. While a silence lasting for 7 of the performer's heartbeats may not be clearly perceived as exactly 7 heartbeats to the listener, I think it is a more compelling way of representing the number 7 as a duration. With this in mind, I devised a concept of "natural time", in which shorter musical durations are organized around a quarter-note pulse aligned with the performer's heartbeat, and longer durations are marked by their inhalation and exhalation. In this particular case, the violinist plays long, drone-like notes on one or two strings, bowing and sliding between notes in time to their breath, while playing left-hand pizzicato notes on the open strings in time to their heartbeat. In this way, the two pulses are presented concurrently, though since the number of heartbeats per breath may vary according to the performer and their mood, I have to give the performer some leeway in aligning these two pulses. Since inhalations tend to be quicker than exhalations, and the resting heart rate is approximately five times the resting respiratory rate for adults, I assigned half notes to the inhalations and dotted half notes to the exhalations, but this is only an approximation, and should not be read as an exact correspondence with the quarter-note heartbeat pulse.
Now, music incorporating biometric units of duration is not in itself a new idea; the heartbeat is a natural starting point for determining tempo, and melodies tend to fall into phrases demarcated by breath. Many modern composers, such as Pauline Oliveros, have explicitly used breath as a durational and organizational unit. But I feel that I arrived at my concept of natural time independently, and that it has its own worth. In particular, I was struck by the potentially self-modifying aspect of natural time: the performer's pulse and breathing rate may go up if they have to play particularly fast or strenuous music, and slow down when they have sustained notes. Thus, in Blues in Natural Time, I contrast sections of natural time, featuring slowly-shifting drones and occasional plucked notes, with more active sections of fast rhythmic and melodic activity. I had at one point hoped to have the faster sections defined by subdivisions of the heartbeat, but I found that my particular musical ideas did not fall neatly into heartbeat-length groupings, so I went with more conventional tempo indications for those sections. As a whole, these sections outline a single chorus of a 12-bar blues form, though the concept of "bar" doesn't really apply here. The sections in natural time give a skeletal outline of the harmonic progression of the blues, and the faster sections fill in the gaps with melodic elaborations. Although the exact pace of the natural time is unpredictable from one performance to another, I had a pretty solid idea, based on my own pulse and breathing, of what these sections would sound like. In the premiere performance, violinist Dana Price surprised me by just how calm she was: her natural breath length seemed to be almost 50% longer than mine, so the drones last much longer than I expected. At one point, I considered asking her to breathe faster, but decided against it.
I think the concept of natural time has a lot of potential for exploration. One idea that I would especially like to try out, if I can become proficient with the technology, would be a concerto-like piece where one performer, probably a percussionist, wears a heart monitor which is then electronically processed to generate an audible pulse for the piece. I could then induce a faster pulse by having the monitored performer play complex passages, or even have them running across the stage from one instrument to another, and then give instructions for breathing exercises or brief meditation to slow things down. Or maybe I could try to manipulate the pulse through psychological means -- what would happen if the pulse-performer was listening to an audible pulse which had been processed to be 10% faster than their own? Would that create a positive feedback loop? What if it spirals out of control? What if the performer just can't keep up with themself? What if -- oh, now I'm drifting into an Andy Kaufman performance.
Footnotes
1Another instance of this can be found in A Resurrection Series by Andy Sauerwein. In this piece, which contrasts the corporeal and spiritual aspects of Jesus as depicted in a series of drawings by artist Randall Speck, the intervals between movements are multiples of 3 seconds, successively decreasing from 24 seconds down to 3 seconds, while important structural moments are marked by passages of bell sounds whose durations are multiples of 7 seconds, increasing from 7 seconds up to 49 seconds. In this instance, I do not consider these durations to be as arbitrary, as the persistent patterns allow the durations to be perceived relative to one another, and in proportion. The "3" and "7", both chosen for their theological significance, may not be directly perceived, but it is my understanding that the composer did not mean for them to be literally perceived. What did irritate me, however, was how the patterns were executed in practice. In dress rehearsal and at the premiere, the conductor would precisely count off 27-3n seconds after the end of movement n, and then beat off an empty measure to cue us into the next movement. As a result, the interval of silence between movements was not 27-3n seconds, but longer by an amount which depended on the tempo and meter of the ensuing movement. The overall pattern of decreasing intervals was still present, but the durations were no longer in proportion, and the sense of the number 3, if it was ever present, was in my mind lost.
2Yes, I know that the rotation of the earth and the revolution of the earth around the sun are not fixed standards of duration, but I am looking at the issue from the standpoint of human perception, and the variability of the day and year fall well within the acceptable tolerances to be perceived as standards. In fact, our perception of the length of one day probably has less relative variance than our perception of the length of one second.
3Yes, I know that a second can be defined in terms of any of these standards, and is thus not arbritrary in the sense that, say, the standard kilogram is arbitrary. However, these definitions are not meaningful to the perception of the performer or listener in the moment. Can you even imagine, in the absence of any mechanical contrivances, how to take a full day, and divide it into 86,400 sub-intervals of equal size? Or, worse yet, how to perceive "the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom"? I think it's safe to say that, from a perceptual standpoint, seconds are arbitrary. If you took a (human) listener who had never encountered any form of mechanized or digitized horology, and set your metronome to click at 60 beats per minute, they would probably perceive the beat as something a little slower than a typical heartbeat, which is part of my point.
