Schoenberg's Labyrinth

Score (.pdf)
Performance Instruction (.pdf)

Schoenberg’s Labyrinth is an graphic open-score to encourage random (or more accurately, indeterminate) permutations of five notes based on Schoenberg’s Farben chord. I wrote Schoenberg’s Labyrinth with the Hearing Things massed guitar ensemble in mind and to expand our repertoire but I'd be intrigued to hear other performances.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Schoenberg piece Farben with its strange, contradictory static-yet-moving sonority, achieved with just five notes*. Not so much the orchestral version, but a realisation for choir, which I think, because of the limited timbral range of just voices, put me in mind of our massed guitars.

I wrote out the five notes of the harmony (incorrectly, as it transpired) and used the ‘labyrinth’ structure to encourage players to play the notes (fairly) randomly. There could just be a text instruction to ‘play these five notes randomly’ but, humans being humans rather than computers, might not play so randomly. The labyrinth, with its different paths, helps the players mix up their notes (although I discovered in the playing it’s interesting how certain paths get under the fingers and become motifs).

Of course, the use of structured chance in this way goes all the way back to Mozart’s dice game, John Cage’s I Ching experiments and beyond, and has always been an interest of mine. The score consists of the labyrinth and the performance instructions which direct the ensemble to develop a ‘reading’ of the score which suits their purposes.

For Hearing Things, we developed a half-hour performance that takes in a short introduction where just single notes from the harmony are used (to ease the audience into this discordant sound world) before embarking on a journey through the labyrinth using sustaining devices - extravagant reverb or other delay-based pedals, e-bows and such like (it helps that we all have similar but different devices). We incorporated rhythmic eighth-note playing of the notes too (referred to in our instruction shorthand as ‘chugging’) - vaguely reminiscent of Glenn Branca although perhaps not so heavy.

We also developed new readings - after some experimentation - an instruction to play an A before each labyrinth note developed into a satisfying ending where we all gravitated toward the A note to close. It turned out the C# should have been a G#, but something was lost in my scribble and it ended up in the final version as C#. Mortified at my mistake, at the second rehearsal I confessed and we debated inking in the correct note (C becomes a G quite easily - probably the source of the original error), but my bandmate Thom thought it was better to ‘honour thy error as a hidden intention’ (the Brian Eno Oblique Strategy) and continue with the C#, substituting it for G# at the halfway point in our reading.

* I’m probably not remotely qualified to analyse this piece and have only the barest understanding of Klangfarbenmelodie, let alone twelve-tone theory. Transcribing the chord incorrectly belies this naivety, which I have no option but to play as a strength. I don’t wish to offend any Schoenberg scholars through my reading and appropriation of the original Farben piece.