Labyrinth
for solo flute
1973
8 minutes
[Not available for performance]
Composer notes: I wrote this piece for solo flute to accompany a dance piece choreographed for four dancers. The dance piece was partly improvisational, with individual dancers starting various sections in response to cues from each other. The length of the dance could vary considerably. (The process the dancers used reminded me of the process of performing Terry Riley’s In C, which I had participated in twice.)
I solved the duration problem by writing about eight minutes of music, divided into five sections. Each section was notated in a separate box. Two boxes used tradition metric notation (though the music sounded nonmetric), and three used proportional rhythmic notation. The boxes were connected by arrows and instructions which controlled which sections could be repeated if the piece went beyond eight minutes.
The performance went well, and I received several compliments on the music. But I disliked the experience. I wanted to have more control of the dramatic shape of my music, and to do that I needed to shape it so that events happened in a particular order and within relatively fixed time frames (proportional to tempo).
For me, this experience raised questions of responsibility and decision-making. While I could understand the value of improvisation, I felt the piece had gone on too long in performance (as I felt had happened with the Riley In C performances I had participated in). In my younger days I had done some jazz trumpet playing, and in that situation improvisation had taken place within a specific number of measures, and was framed within specific harmonic progressions. Left free to improvise the duration of a piece, performers too often seemed to enjoy improvising for far longer periods than an audience member found it enjoyable to experience. (I attended several please-just-let-this-stop improvisations in the 1970s that brought new meaning to the word “self-indulgent.”)
I came away from this project feeling that if a work was going to be presented in public, then someone (such as the choreographer or composer) needed to accept responsibility for making structural decisions in advance of the presentation (including the approximate duration of various sections). I also felt that such decisions needed to be made with some effort to imagine to how the work might be perceived from an audience’s perspective. I destroyed this score.