David Chisholm - Composition Process Diary

David Chisholm

David Chisholm 's The muster-book of the dynamic systems collective was a composition written for ACOF 2004.

 

...I set fire to my kitchen last night, so clearly I am rather absorbed in the writing of 'The Muster-Book of the Dynamical Systems Collective'...

Composition Diary - June 2004

I wanted to begin with "I look at my window…I pick up my pen and I start to compose" if for no other reason than a tribute TO ABSENT COMPOSERS. But in truth, I have neither a window to look out, nor a pen at hand. Rather I have a painting, a computer, a book on Chaos Theory, and the mid-point of a rather stubborn ten-minute work for orchestra entitled The Muster-Book of the Dynamical Systems Collective.

On January 1 of this year I flew back from Sydney after a NYE spent watching fireworks from a party in the Northern Foyer of the SOH Opera Theatre, and straight into a phenomenal party upstairs at the Stokehouse in St Kilda on NYD afternoon. THE ST. KILDA PARTY WAS PERFECT - sunset on the bay, warm weather, no breeze, and 120 of my closest acquaintances and DJ Liz Millar on decks. An auspicious start to 2004 made all the more auspicious because Gavin Brown, an extraordinary painter who was also at the party, and I agreed to do an art swap. In exchange for a large canvas of Gavin's entitled, Narcissist - which I had wanted since the first time I saw it ten months prior - I would inscribe, perform and record an orchestral work for him. This was an ambitious promise as at that stage I was yet to been informed whether or not I was to return for ACOF 2004. I didn't and don't have an orchestra or recording studio in my back pocket. With the transaction of a painting for an orchestral piece established, I immediately and unavoidably thought of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. While I was never going to try and reinvent 19th programme music, I could at least site the beginnings of an etymology of form for my new work.

Narcissist too, was not to be the subject of the exchange work per se, but rather would act as a trigger for the search for an appropriate theoretical framework. PHILOSOPHY is the driver of my work rather than technique. Although that said, I am completely revising my technical language with The Muster-Book of the Dynamical Systems Collective. I have been fixated with pulse and plunderphonics for the last few years, and I'm bored now with my own language. All the figures in Narcissist appear to belong in the one room: a great chamber, with staircase and all trappings. There are some spatial anomalies that distinguish it from straightforward portraiture. Two semi-naked men could be the one man, three cats could be the same cat, a game of strip poker, two hostesses appear to be form times and the room appears to be a convergence point of several planes of perspective. In addition to the actual figures in the room, there are figures in paintings within the painting. One appears to be a reference to a David self-portrait, the others too, read as familiar. In summary these people appear as separate events, yet all clearly belong to the room. Ultimately the effect is one of fracture, disjuncture. Since the painting arrived in March I have been locked into an ongoing relationship with it. Living with a great work of art is without measure, its value and impact undeniable.

Within a week of Narcissist's arrival, I was throwing books off the shelf in search of James Gleick's seminal book CHAOS: Making a New Science which I had read first some 14 years ago. On reading at a later chapter of my own life, I arrived at the chapter on the work done by THE DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS COLLECTIVE and I immediately knew I was onto something. Robert Stetson Shaw, Doyne Farmer, James P. Crutchfield and Norman Packard became then, the subjects of my piece: a kind of orchestral pataphysical portraiture (I use the term pataphysical, as it was never my intention to try and directly transcribe their theories into musical form. To so would be pure kitsch.). I decided to compose an homage to each of them from a secondary source, a literary one in the case of the Gleick book. I also decided to add in a fifth portrait that was to be dedicated to the Systron-Donner analogue computer that they used for much of their research. The idea was to evoke the rather than transcribe the findings of their work and the principles of their faith. As they moved into completely unknown territory, working mostly on instinct, they found themselves at the mouth of a volcano of information theory. I have long been intrigued by what I see as the orbital relationship - rather than dialectical - between free will and determinism. The notion that a solid structure merges out of what appears on the surface to be chaotic seems to make perfect sense to any artist. I am in e-mail contact with the four physicists in USA who are all humbled by my gesture of writing an homage, and yes also a little curious about why them, and how it will all sound.

I settled on a structure with an overall duration of the specified 10, but that was in essence was actually a collection of five orchestral miniatures, or tessellated events. This matched neatly I thought, the notion of temporal simultaneity in Gavin's painting as well as philosophically with Norman Packard's comments on INFORMATION THEORY:

"Intuitively there seems a clear sense in which these ultimately complicated systems are generating information. Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of year later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person's mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated - created from connections that were not there before."

Each section of the orchestral work, each member of the set as it were, I decided should have a duration that is asymmetric to the others as symmetry smacked of classical physics. I decided that the conductor should choose the order in which they present the sections. Very much like an observer of the painting determines within the parameters of the canvas the sequence of events to read the painting each time they look at it. So too, by creating the potential for 120 PERMUTATIONS of how my piece can be performed, I can within set parameters, vary the experience of the piece completely. The result in one respect will always be the same: the same information will pass into the ear of the listener. However the journey has a potential of 120 different pathways. I find myself writing a piece of music that thinks it is a Strange Attractor.

Important to remember in a structure like this is that each section beginning is also potentially the beginning of the larger form. And each ending potentially an overall ending. This is why I cannot avoid the term pataphysics, since I automatically oscillate between theoretical structure and showmanship. To engage the listener effectively, I naturally must consider the impact of gestures within the work for an audience. What I struggle with most is precisely this mutability. As easy as it might be to assume one could just generate FIVE FLASHY BEGINNINGS AND ENDS, I want the piece to be a seguing series of events. Therefore each beginning and end must also have the capacity to conceptually (and practically) dovetail the previous or following section. Keeping a form like this afloat I am finding mind-bending, but satisfying in that I really don't know what the hell I am doing, but there is adrenalin aplenty. Instinctively I am delivering the work although much slower than I am accustomed.

For the curious, A MUSTER-BOOK is a term I bring in from Renaissance English, being essentially a book in which the muster-rolls are transcribed. A muster-roll is a register of the officers and men in an army or ship's company, and in the case of the Dynamical Systems Collective, there were four men and the computer. The word muster itself is as much about patterns as it is about people, and the word must, the root word, is both imperative and nostalgic (I'm thinking musty here). My apologies for my delay in delivering this on-line diary entry. I am running my life increasingly THE PRINCIPLES OF CHAOS it appears. I set fire to my kitchen last night, so clearly I am rather absorbed in the writing of The Muster-Book of the Dynamical Systems Collective. While I cannot at all lay claim to anything but the most personal and internal of revolutions, I am reminded nonetheless of the late great Thomas S Kuhn, the man who popularised the word "paradigm" who once said: "Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial."

David Chisholm

Melbourne, Tuesday 29 June 2004