Art allows for a relation with the external world that gives relatively free reign to the creative potentials that are specific to the human species. Artistic creation distinguishes itself in this way from numerous cognitive activities traditionally studied in the field of the cognitive sciences. Artistic creation, and more specifically musical creation, is not, however, free of all constraints. Music is a form of free expression, partly symbolic and partly based directly on sound, that reposes within a system of rules — of plausibilities — even if these rules seem only to exist in order to be subtly surpassed and modified. The "monitored freedom" that characterizes musical creation teaches us something fundamental about the plasticity of human cognitive function. Indeed, musical systems continue to evolve and to be modified over the course of human history. This, in turn, requires the cognitive systems that produce and understand them to adjust themselves continuously to such new organizations. These adjustments are not always made without resistance. The passionate debates generated throughout the 20th Century by the emergence of what came to be called "contemporary" music bear witness to the importance of the social and aesthetic stakes raised by a question that is, in the end, fundamentally cognitive and artistic in nature.
In 1955 John Cage wrote an article entitled "Experimental music". This was soon followed, in 1957, by another on the same topic and finally, by a paper on the history of experimental music in the United States. According to Cage's view, the composers of that time were principally concerned with exploration, invention, experimentation, and research. And when one looks back over the major advances of musical composition in the 20th Century, Cage's insight is indeed confirmed. In keeping with this stance towards composition, Roger Reynolds is a composer for whom experimentation is a natural process of musical creation. As Nancy Scott Anderson (1993) has recently observed: "Reynolds' use of computer algorithms, stemming from his first career as a systems development engineer in the missile industry, may well make of the composer the archetypal UCSD faculty member, one who stood Oppenheimer on his head. […] Reynolds told a reporter that scientists are 'expected to explore and are expected to be accountable for their work'. Thus, the science orientation of UCSD was 'the ideal context for exploring and presenting the fruits of my research'." (Anderson, 1993, p. 222)
Not only was Reynolds conducting experiments while following a fruitful path leading to the new composition of music in a wide variety of genres, but he also made a serious effort to see to it that others could find the necessary means for their own research. Two years after his arrival on the faculty of the University of California at San Diego, he was instrumental in obtaining a large Rockefeller Foundation grant that established the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research (CME) on the UCSD campus. CME was a focal point of ongoing research in technology and the arts. So in the wake of his own quest, Reynolds helped others: through his co-founding of CME, through his teaching, and, most of all, through his musical works and the texts he published about his research. This e-book documents yet another step along his collaborative path.
The general goal of the Angel Project, aside from the central purpose of creating a musical work, was to bring objective elements of reflection to questions raised within a research approach that marries the methods and frameworks of the cognitive sciences with the human sciences in the domain of music. In instances such as this one, the study of contemporary musical creation presents an essential theoretical and methodological advantage: that of being able to conceive of scientific research in direct interaction with a composer. However, composers don't compose music "in general", they compose specific pieces of music, and so the project necessarily had to focus on a particular work, albeit a work conceived within the general goals of the project itself that were simultaneously artistic and scientific. Within the framework of this interactive project, the psychologists' aim was thus to analyze: 1) the processes of invention and problem solving in music composition, 2) the perceptual processing and memorization of musical materials, 3) the perceptual and memory processing of variations or transformations applied to these materials as well as the integration of the materials and their transformations into a whole; this whole, in turn, would then affect 4), the experience over time of the entire piece in a live concert situation. This ambitious project required the involvement of people with many different skills, including a composer, musicologists, and psychologists. Each category of collaborator brought its own set of concepts, vocabulary, assumptions, and thought processes, which had to be confronted and also reconciled over the course of the project. They are presented in three parallel streams with many opportunities for interpenetration.
The chapters in this e-book report on various aspects of a project involving the interaction of musical creation, psychological experimentation, and musicological analysis. The composer Roger Reynolds and the psychologist Stephen McAdams first met at IRCAM in the early 1980s and began a collaborative interaction leading to the integration of psychoacoustic results concerning sound segregation into Reynolds' piece Archipelago (1982-83). In 1993, they began the conversations that led to the present project. The artistic object — a chamber piano concerto — was conceived so as to provide unique access for psychologists to the musical process itself. The aim was to explore the perception and cognition of contemporary musical materials and forms as they relate to the intentions and goals of a composer. IRCAM-Centre Pompidou commissioned the work, The Angel of Death for piano, chamber orchestra and computer-processed sound (Reynolds, 2001). Emmanuel Bigand of the Université de Bourgogne became involved in 1997 and funding was acquired from the Art and Cognition section of the French Ministry of Research's Cognitique program. The team progressively expanded over the next five years to include musicologists Philippe Lalitte and Franèois Madurell, psychologists Bénédicte Poulin-Charronnat and Charles Delbé, and composer Daniel D'Adamo (all working with Bigand's group at the LEAD in Dijon), psychologists Sandrine Vieillard and Olivier Houix and engineer Bennett Smith (working in McAdams' group at IRCAM in Paris), and psychologist Bradley Vines from McGill University in Montréal.
The original form of the piece was proposed to the psychologists at the end of 1997. Ensuing discussions in La Jolla at the University of California, San Diego with Reynolds, McAdams, Bigand and UCSD's Gerald Balzano concerned both how the form would allow for the study of large-scale formal influences as they occurred during ongoing music listening, and also what kinds of experiments might be designed to test them. The main thematic materials were characterized, composed, and orchestrated in mid- to late-1998 and early 1999. Josef Kucera recorded them in their orchestral versions at UCSD in March 1999 with the SONOR ensemble, conducted by Harvey Sollberger. Franck Rossi at IRCAM recorded the piano versions in May 2000 as performed by pianist Jean-Marie Cottet. In addition to becoming the basis of psychological experiments, these recordings were also the source materials for the entire computer-processed layer of the piece, realized with the assistance of Frédéric Voisin at IRCAM in September and December 2000 and March 2001. The scores for the two parts of the piece ("S” for Sectional, and "D” for Domain) were finalized in the spring of 2001.
The world premier concert took place within IRCAM's Agora Festival in Paris in June 2001 with pianist Jean-Marie Cottet and the Ensemble Court-Circuit ("short circuit" in French) conducted by Pierre-André Valade. Serge Lemouton handled the dissemination of the computer layer, and Franck Rossi was mixing engineer. The North American premier concert took place in La Jolla, California within the Time Forms Festival at UCSD in April 2002 with pianist Gloria Cheng and the SONOR Ensemble conducted by Harvey Sollberger. Peter Otto supervised the computer layer with assistance from Shahrokh Yadegari, and Josef Kucera was mixing engineer. At these concerts, an IRCAM-built system of 128 continuous response devices designed by Emmanuel Fléty, manufactured by Franèois Gibouin and Martine Gautier, and engineered into an integrated data collection system by Bennett Smith, were used to continuously record listeners' reactions to the piece according to two different listening criteria: familiarity/novelty and emotional force.
The idea of an e-book aimed at documenting the compositional, musicological and experimental efforts was proposed by Marc Battier, then at IRCAM. Stephen McAdams directed the project with the help of the composer and several of the researchers involved. Bertrand Cheret designed and programmed the e-book's multimedia interactive user interfaces.
This undertaking could not have been brought to fruition without the support of IRCAM and the University of California, San Diego. Parts of the contents of this e-book appeared in a special issue of the journal Music Perception guest edited by Daniel J. Levitin, and they appear here courtesy of the University of California Press. The composer's sketches and notebooks from this project are in the U. S. Library of Congress' "Roger Reynolds Special Collection" in Washington D.C.
This e-book has been conceived as three separate streams: one devoted to Composition, one to Perception, and one to Analysis. These three streams explore, in detail, the composer's particular approach to the creation of The Angel of Death and also the listener's reception of the work from the perspectives of cognitive science and musicology.
The three streams are independent but nevertheless deeply intertwined. Each stream, in its own manner, enhances the unique qualities of The Angel of Death and illustrates numerous aspects of the production process. They have arisen out of the unusual amount of scrutiny surrounding the genesis of The Angel of Death and records that were kept in relation to this effort.
The reader is invited to skip from one stream to another by way of crossover links. Convergence points can be found along the way as well. The three streams run in parallel through the four main sections of the e-book: 1) general introduction, 2) consideration of musical materials, 3) consideration of material transformations, and 4) dynamic conceptions of musical form. The e-book concludes with a general synthesis. Thus, the overall presentation of the Angel Project resembles a checkerboard on which the reader may move about freely. Thanks to hypertextual navigation, one can explore any stream within each section — each cell is an essential component of the whole and serves to tessellate the overall picture.
The Composition Stream is composed of a detailed text by Roger Reynolds dealing with several of the composer's main compositional perspectives — time, space, form, material, writing, and transformation — as they were developed during the composition of the piece.
The Perception Stream is a mosaic of texts, sound examples, experimental data, and illustrations provided by the scientific team that worked with the composer from the outset. This mosaic provides the reader with the rare chance to enter a scientific laboratory in which the experimental material is also the main subject of the project — namely, the music of The Angel of Death. Readers are also given the opportunity to participate themselves in the same experiments that the psychologists undertook. A set of programs is provided by means of which they can express and measure their own reactions to the experience of listening to the piece's musical materials in isolation or to the whole piece itself.
The Analysis Stream comprises a series of texts by musicologists. Their insight helps to situate The Angel of Death within Roger Reynolds' own body of works and compositional approach, as well as within larger currents in contemporary and late 19th Century music, and also to draw comparisons between music performance and its reception.
The streams all converge at occasional integration points, the aim of which is to weave together the different streams and their approaches to The Angel of Death. The General Introduction describes the aims of the Angel Project and then diverges to the three streams in a section devoted to the musical materials. The streams converge again in a section summarizing the three approaches to musical materials and then diverge towards consideration of transformations of the materials. They converge again to confront the three approaches to this same subject and then diverge once again for consideration of musical form. At the end, they finally join as the different approaches to musical form are woven together. A general synthesis of the outcomes of the project concludes the parallel journeys.
It is our hope that this somewhat utopian project, which sought to have musical creation, psychological exploration and musicological analysis interact in a mutually beneficial fashion, also succeeded in respecting the different standards of excellence, ethics, and aesthetics that form the foundations of each discipline.
From here, you may choose to follow the Composition Stream, the Perception Stream or the Analysis Stream. The streams will converge at various points after they have dealt with issues related to the musical materials, to transformations of those materials, or to musical form. In the next section, the Composition Stream will elaborate the composer's general approach to the piece and aspects of the compositional process concerning the thematic materials. The Perception Stream will relate experiments on the perception of musical similarity for the thematic materials from The Angel of Death and of their perceptual and rhetorical structure. The Analysis Stream will consider Reynolds' music within the broader context of contemporary music and defines some of the main ideas that imposed themselves on the work. It will also explore the importance of pianistic gesture in the piece and will consider differences in understanding thematic materials that may come about on the basis of "inner hearing” while reading a score, on the one hand, and on the basis of direct hearing of a performed version of the materials on the other.