Job Michiel van Zuijlen 

Contemplating music at an early age.

Electronic and computer music have brought the composer a new arsenal of sounds to play with. The use of magnetic tape in musique concrète, pioneered by Pierre Shaeffer, introduced everyday sounds into a musical composition. In his book Silence, John Cage remarks that ways to store sounds, such as magnetic tape, made it finally possible to compose with ‘non-musical’ sounds, as opposed to the musical sounds of the orchestra. He points that using ‘noises’ as opposed to ‘tones’ as elements of musical expression has repercussions for the kind of organizational principle that is needed for musical composition.

Learning about John Cage and his approach to music has helped me to come to grips with the challenge of how to employ all those new sounds that are available to us in musical composition today. If you are ‘tone-centered’ and think in terms of chord progressions (which I do myself, sometimes) you limit yourself to a particular style of music which does not really absorb the new sonic possibilities very well. If you know how to write for percussion, you are already much better equipped; many percussion instruments have a noise-like quality. You can also think in non-musical terms. I often view creating electronic music as painting or sculpting with sound. Or you may get inspired by the art of film-making, which, like music, has a temporal aspect.

So it is crucial to find an organizational principle that suits you, otherwise you will be swamped by all those available sounds. I have created compositions based of the idea of an imaginary landscape: while traversing through time you arrive at different locations in this landscape and the sounds you hear change likewise. They may or may not resemble real-life sounds such as water or wind, but they do give the impression of a specific ‘sonosphere’. These are older pieces for which I used analog electronic equipment. The real-time character of the equipment allowed instant feedback and a lot of the basic material was created much in the way of improvised music. I would then combine the material: either by creating a sequence in time of different portions or by layering several portions and have them sound simultaneously.

I do not, in general, compose on paper first. For more ‘traditional’ work, I use a MIDI sequencer, which is just another way to record a composition, with the advantage that you can hear what you are doing and can make instant changes. This kind of immediate feedback is essential to me. I was told once in a computer-music composition class that there was an advanced class where compositions were studied only on paper, since real composers don’t need anything else. That rules me out, I guess. I am not a real composer...

© 2008 - Job M. van Zuijlen

Last updated: July 11, 2008

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