Copyright ©2007 by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
It sprang from the mind of hyperactive Rob Voisey, composer and idea-maven, and his loose-knit composer organization, Vox Novus. And now, like the Pod People of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it is appearing across the world. It has become a meme.
A decade ago, hardly anyone would consider short compositions a valid artform. Even though popular song was reduced to three minutes by early Twentieth Century recording technology, any shorter creation was meaningless -- perhaps a jingle at most or something, well, odd. Mack the Knife was really only a repeated few seconds, but that repetition -- pre-minimalism by half a century -- created the finished song. And no matter that motives from Bach to Wagner in the classical realm were short snippets hardly qualifying as melodies themselves; they were humble elements used to build great cathedrals of sound ... and the concentration was on the cathedral, not the lonely gargoyle.
When Rob wrote an article in New Music Box in May 2004, the concept of a short form was still suspect. Short forms were alive, of course, in the case of sonic iconography: from the ancient Westminster chimes through the carefully sculpted startup of Windows or Mac, the "Intel Inside" audio logo, and the distinctive walkie-talkie signal. (They were compositions? Who knew?)
There were other examples, derided -- at least until the arrival of postmodernism -- as insignificant. The leitmotif was part of soap operas, the eight-note incipit a Beethovenian marker for Star Trek, and the repeated four-note motive indelible for The Twilight Zone. Even before that, cartoon music was 'micro-motivic' with a marriage of image and sound by the likes of Carl Stalling, and its later nonpop hommage in John Zorn's Cat O'Nine Tails. Finally, the digital era was the perfect amanuensis for short compositions, whether in John Oswald's samples too short for conscious labeling or in turntabling and scratch as elusive substructures of hiphop. Even The Frog Peak Collaborations Project collected one hundred fifteen minute-long compositions for a CD collection, but it ended there.
And then, starting in 2003, Rob brought the short forms out of the shadows by calling specifically for them, collecting them, organizing them, and presenting them in the illuminating 60x60 concert format. The format defied reviews and simultaneously found its place in varying geography. How did it happen? Why does it matter?
At one time, a single 60x60 existed: a playback concert sixty minutes long with sixty composers contributing music of sixty seconds or less. Like most new music events, it seemed destined for one-shotdom, even if that first hour might have been filled with worthwhile listening. And then, to paraphrase Shaffer's Salieri: "A miracle!" Composers had short pieces ... or were excited to create them. The Vox Novus mailbox began to fill. A concert was scheduled, and then another. Radio "extravaganzas" exploded in on-air studios, with hundreds of CDs crated in and searched through in phone-in email-in real time. Collaborations were invited with presenters and other media artists.
By 2007, 60x60 had received 1,500 compositions from a thousand composers, with three dozen performances in North America and Europe. Regional 60x60 concerts featured nearby composers -- New York, Midwest, Pacific Rim, and the UK along with 'international mixes' -- and video artists created collaborative experiences. CDs were released on Capstone Records, and other productions were modeled on the concept that great music wasn't always long music, and unexpected art could be compelling and even entertaining. A long way for a long shot.
But that's 60x60 from the outside, viewed by accomplishments. From the perspective of a composer who has answered each year's call and had the privilege of some of those contributions being programmed, 60x60 is a special challenge. Sixty seconds is all the time composers are given to connect with audiences who have never heard their music before and will likely never hear their work again. It is a challenge to be perfect in a microscopic slice of time. On the other hand from perfection, the welcome that the Vox Novus project offers might also be exploited as a dumping ground for sketches and unfinished ideas on the chance that some résumé-enhancing airplay or concert performance might come along. Whether Rob got the castoffs, I don't know. But the shape and content of the Vox Novus concerts are polished.
That's the review. But what are the implications of 60x60's success? Easiest to assess is the acceptance of unusual and experimental new nonpop on the part of presenters and audiences when offered in an atmosphere untainted by academicism, stylistic hectoring, or artificial gravitas. It also suggests that composers are willing to extricate themselves from the masterpiece syndrome -- at least long enough to sculpt a short composition once each year. And it reveals that the "Nonpop Revolution" has been won bloodlessly, with a new generation of artists and audience -- the same audience that is able to hear the entire short story in Chan Marshall's thirty-second How Can I Tell You? or Robot Repair's Heineken Draught Keg, or even from the extracted fragment of Aswefall's Between the Miles sung over the floating Air France swimming pool.
In an iPod culture, all music is evanescent. Though a thousand, two thousand, five thousand 'songs' might be carried around as bits bundled in plastic, the attention to each is both fleeting and out of context, or at best with a marketed faux-context offered by its commercial wrapping. Otherwise, meaning is excised by shuffle, while glinting, unrelated surfaces remains, like Chan & her DeBeers client. Indeed, the spreading Pod People of 60x60 are also part of the iPod culture -- yet while 60x60 encourages even shorter attention, it also provides context. Context is a component that postmodernism has yet to assimilate, as a calculated denial, rejection and absence of context have been the culture's hallmarks.
The contradiction inherent in 60x60 offers hope to those of us who believe contexts -- history, relationships, cultural identifiers -- remain crucial to humanity's potential self-understanding. The contradiction is enlivened by the fact that Rob, himself a postmodernist, is the filter into 60x60. He has created context by the number of pieces in each concert, which grow a microculture with its own context, reinforced by four years of temporal direction and multiple, geographically adjusted presentations.
There's more. Like microtonality, which feels like chromaticism after aural immersion in its melodic and harmonic world, a short composition sounds long after immersion in its temporal universe. The effect is not imaginary, as anyone hypnotized by Heineken Draught Keg will grasp. A hundred modulations in Beethoven lessen the impact of each one; perhaps one will recall that modulation to the third in the Pastoral, or not. But just one modulation in a minute-length piece is shattering -- or one shift of position, or one transformation of color, or one alteration of timbre, or one transposition of image. It's stretching of time by compressing time -- the shortest hour that becomes the hyperspace of the longest hour -- that makes a minute's worth of unfinished ideas as revelatory as the sketchpads of Picasso or Leonardo, and complete sixty-second works like the miniature that is Persistence of Memory.