These structures gather around two basic orientations.  If a music’s sonic image derives from the decisions of a single composer, its interactive structure could be called monological.  If a sound body accommodates the interchanges of more than one composer, its interactive structure could be understood as a dialogical one.  The two alternatives organize very different varieties of musical performance, while a range of differently proportioned mixed structures are able to blend these in a variety of ways.

The paths pursued by listening in the generating of musical sound leaves tracks along which one may follow the flows of information through a music’s interactive structure.  ”Listening to the listening” of the participants who design and sound a sonic image can open insights into how music behaves as event.

A composer, for example, listens to, and for, the unheard, — the not yet heard. A composer listens to, and through, imagination.  A composer also listens to, and for, a music’s listeners (and, after all, a composer is a listener as well).  A composer imagines the listener, imagines a meeting and relation of listener with sound.  All of this inflects the context from within which a composer chooses; and this is a listening that shapes the flow of the music’s corresponding sounds.

Within a monologically organized interactive structure, performers coordinate around the directives of a single compositional persona.  This persona may speak for one actual person (or “composer”). It may assemble the composite persona of an advance collaboration of contributors.  It may represent an inherited, collective, anonymous or “traditional” persona (or it may be posed as an otherwise adopted model for imitation).  Whatever the actual source, it’s this compositional persona who’s decided which sounds happen when.

The performers do not decide which sounds happen; and in this sense, they emphatically do not compose (although unavoidable gaps in any set of instructions always grant some latitude for interpretation).  Performers listen for a composer’s designated sonic image while they listen closely to each other in order to assure that its being achieved in accurate tandem.  Such careful uncertainty amid swift proximity to breakdown animates some of the essential tensions and heroism of musical performance.

In a monological format, musical information flows unidirectionally.  It’s relayed along a lineal, cause-and-effect sequence from “composer” (or model), to performer, to listener.  The steady reference signal of a designated sonic image is collectively accepted as non-negotiable and is bounded clearly by “right notes” and “wrong notes.”  Streamlining a music’s interactive structure this way helps establish a fairly unambiguous field of reference for ensemble convergence and divergence that collaterally frees each performer to concentrate ever more carefully on individual details of application.  Convergence assembles around appropriate and well coordinated execution, while divergence can only register as mistake.

         Divergence functions very differently in a dialogical structure.  A number of contributors venture compositional choices simultaneously while the music’s still emerging into sound.  It’s a mutually recognized condition that decision steams of collaborating composers have to just about immediately begin diverging from each other.  These centrifugal tendencies fuel and complement ongoing and ooIlective renegotiations of the music’s convergences.  Already alert to personal imagination, ensemble coordination and the evolving sonic image, dialogical composers listen to each other in order to decide what to play next.  Overall coherence develops as each participant draws (and draws upon) opportune connections among the sonic initiatives of one’s compatriots.

Compositional information in dialogical structures flows multidirectionally.  The interactions are complex, reciprocal and, in exact detail, unpredictable.  Initiatives are continually absorbed, reevaluated and transformed from as many different perspectives as there are contributors.  Sounds, patterns and concepts (a.k.a. musical “material”) assume an additional function alongside articulating a sonic image: they simultaneously communicate musical information among participating composers.  Structural communication is thus audibly externalized through the sounds of the music. They allow composers to “talk to” each other while these very same sounds address their audience. The composite sonic image of all of these interchanges reflects necessary feedback for continuing inventions and interventions.

Monological coordination leans deterministic where dialogical structures bend more probabilistic.  The first optimizes the clarifying advantages of stasis, while the other succeeds through homeostasis. With the exception of a capella solo improvisation, monological organization tends toward replicable, stable sonic imagery, while sonic images of dialogical music fluctuate in accordance with the curvature of its compositional interactions.

This intimate correspondence of musical sound with the compositional activities that generate it demonstrates that to more accurately “hear” a music involves more than participation in its sonic patterns.  There isn’t really any one-size-fits-all rubric for relating with musical sound as if it were ziplessly born out of some miracle of immaculate conception.  However else they may encounter a listener, sounds frame and indicate music’s more inaudible activities.

What’s inaudible in music?  Silence is acutely audible, but dance isn’t. Attention is inaudible — as are imagination, consideration, decision and coordination.  All may become evident through sound.  The invisible might turn corporeal while audibly dressed.

The activity of music isn’t so much literally heard as inferred through relationship with sound and through relationships among sounds.  The social structure of musical generation (which includes who decides what – when, where and how decisions are enacted – how this information circulates within an ensemble – and how they achieve sound) constitutes an indispensable component of a music’s composition, of how it’s put together.

While both monological and dialogical activity resonate sonic images, they each encounter a listener as different events.  To really be “heard,” each demands distinct and appropriate empathic calibrations of listening.

During a storyteller’s monologue, any variety of guises, disguises, ruses, voices or masks may be donned in the telling.  A monologist can deftly dissolve behind the specter of tale; but what keeps this event monologue is that it’s not interrupted.  The story emits from a solitary agent.  The relative dearth of interactive information in monological performance minimizes ensemble response and initiative in deference to the clarity of this single compositional signal.  There’s little doubt invited as to the responsible source of the music’s sonic design.

Monological methods don’t so much “solve,” once and for all, the challenges of structural communication and coordination in music as try to eliminate them through a somewhat fordist standardization that narrows ensemble interaction to its lowest possible minimum.  Interaction is kept so much the same every time that, regardless of the music sounded, it seems to disappear almost entirely as an element of musical structure.  Contrastingly, the acute interdependency of collaborating composers in dialogical music renders interaction and relationship central and indispensable components of musical composition.  The efficiency and success of monological organization relies on just one single species of social cooperation, while the possible configurations of interactive coordination figure more than can be counted.

One of the real wonders of music is that it can allow a listener to hear (and feel) a composer think (“thinking” is posed here as a whole body process that incorporates all the ways a person senses).  A monological format reveals the “thinking” of one compositional persona, while dialogical settings present the multiple contentions of a plurality of musical “thinkers.”  One essays the challenge of internal or personal congruence while the other communally refracts this same endeavor within a conversation of perspectives.

Along with its marked impact on musical sound, interactive structure also links with the social organization and conventions of the sonic community that sustains it.  A monological composer precipices the apex of a closed, command and control system.  However efficient this can be, the literal remoteness of a “remote control” system almost too easily exposes compositional directives to potential sabotage, carelessness, incompetence or sullen compliance — with the composer (well, at least a living composer) being the most likely to reap whatever blame there is to be had for the resulting sound.

The trust coordinating a monological composer’s conceptions with its executors perennially holds fragile. One response to this has been to rigorously standardize musicianship so that instrumentalists sound so nearly identical that they can achieve a sort of anonymous interchangeability (as is the case in Euroclassical training).  There are some very good reasons for this too. A thoroughgoing regularization helps insure that composers who design for particular instruments actually have a prayer of hearing what they’ve mapped out.

Standardization, however, can also ricochet back toward composers at a great expense to sound and conception.  Not only has many an “individualist” composer become heard only at the mercy of rigorous conventionalization, but many musical conceptions have had to be adapted to conventional terms and their accompanying social milieus.  Some avant-garde composers have attempted to break through this sort of impasse with a nearly unbearable weight of compensatory, micromanaged specification; but this also carries with it a downside that still smaller communities of musicians may become able and willing to sound the music.  And yet another progressively more available — and ever more popular — response to this dilemma has been to dispense with people altogether and offload this entire problem of musical transmission onto machinery.

Dialogical composers fare no less vulnerable to missteps and disruptions of collaborators, but this condition is equally shared by every contributor. A dialogical composer willingly foregoes monological responsibilities to a position of omniscience for an opportunity to intervene directly in music’s finding shape as it happens, to be able to change one’s mind — and to do this while in collaborative interchange with minds and sensibilities that are not one’s own.

Direct compositional control withdraws to within the reach of each composer’s own instruments and sonic initiatives.  When each assumes direct responsibility for sound generation as a performer, an ensemble coalition can be assembled with a lot less recourse to individual standardization.  A platform thus opens the sonic palette to idiosyncratic knowledge and capacity, to the one of a kind, the untamable, the unmappable, the unusual and the unanticipated.

A dialogical composer exchanges monological control over a music’s global sonic image for relationship.  Each participates in a more decentralized creative project, within which a network of connections is composed — and it’s this slightly transpersonal collective network that’s actually composing the music.

Within such a network, dialogical gestures become structurally provocative.  They’re angled not only to sound, but also to evoke response elsewhere in the flow of the music.  A volatile give and take ripples among the various decision streams that are generating the music.

A silence can accent ongoings in an ensembie just as powerfully as any flurry.  What counts is the relationship with context, placement, timing and the total synergy of interactions.  It’s not for nothing that Miles Davis practiced boxing from a specifically musical perspective.

Social organization can’t really be ostracized as either a core element of musical composition or as an important component of a music’s total aesthetic statement.  The momentum and impact of the social in musical composition, far beyond instrumental mechanics of how sounds are generated, has been insightfully assessed by Christopher Small in his Music of the Common Tongue:

“We are moved by music because musicking creates the public image of our most inwardly desired relationships, not just showing them to us as they might be but actually bringing them into existence for the duration of the performance.  This will clearly involve our deepest feelings, and thus the act of musicking, taking place over a duration of time, teaches us what we really feel about ourselves and about our relationships to other people and to the world in general, helping us to structure those feelings and therefore to explore and evolve our own identity….  ‘How do I know what I feel until I hear what I play?’  In musicking, in fact we are being touched in the deepest parts of who we are.”

The gaps between music imagined, music sounded and music heard nest composers in imperfectly resolvable, aesthetic and ethical conflicts of interest.  What’s more important — the sound or the way people interrelate?  What’s more valuable — a relatively egalitarian distributing of individual initiative and interaction, or a single individual assuming centralized command?  Is musical activity simply a technical means to a sonic end, or is the sound an indicative partner of the activity? What kind of world, developed through what kind of relationships, is worth cultivating?

These are social questions, questions of worldview, questions about a conception of the human, cosmological questions that don’t actually separate from decisions about sounds.  Social and sonic imagination aren’t automatically fit to each other in advance at all; and it might even be supposed that sounds likewise have their own (possibly quite contrary) social notions.

Composers can’t completely avoid at least implicitly taking a stand on these considerations.  Every time one composes, a social position is declared, or at the minimum, explored.  And, at the same time, those not-yet-heard sonic entities for which composers are responsible might be demanding social coordination appropriate to their needs irrespective of social vision.

There’s no perfect solution.  Monological music aspires for the most part to a stable sonic image that corresponds accurately with sonic imagination.  Sonic images are frozen at the cost of interactive motility on behalf of a reliable clarity and precision.  To keep an image stable and consistent, performers can’t afford to move out of line.  They can’t comment on the music.  They can’t talk back.  They can neither add to the music nor extend it.  Interactive aspects of music are kept as dead, comatose or suspended as possible.  The social structure is hierarchical and command based.

Bypassing direct human collaboration (and interference) — as does electronic studio, computer or otherwise generated sound — no less declares an attitude toward musical social interaction than does live music.  In absenting performers, this presents something of a post neutron bomb soundscape.  It’s for the most part, no less monological: but it is less hierarchical — if only because there’s no longer any people involved in the music’s generation process to be issuing commands to.

In multipersonic, interactive composition (a.k.a. collective improvisation), as composers move, so does sound.  A clear fidelity to an individually imagined overall sound runs fugitive because an improvising ensemble’s sonic image simply can’t stand still.  Communication among compositional personae can’t be hidden.  All of which displays some of the apparent “messiness” that horticultural forest gardening tends to show when compared with the surface tidiness of industrial agriculture — until one begins to consider all the internal connections that are (or aren’t) going on.  There’s a trade off in that monological organization hardly allows at all for recomposing interaction, whereas dialogical structures open to a musical composition of interaction and relationship itself.  This is yet something else to listen for.

Neither dialogical nor monological organization by itself at all guarantees “good” or “better” music.  Their dissimilarities are so location specific that comparisons of their interactive topographies can’t really say anything about the “quality” of a music being generated (which emerges instead out of how composers might navigate a particular terrain).  Neither can be “superior” to the other because they’re responding to different concerns.  And no one concern, whether sonic or interactive integrity, holds superior to any other either – but they are different; and these are distinctions decisively crucial for both composing and listening.

There are yet other ways of imagining relationships among these alternatives.  One would be to consider the speed of a composition’s evolution.  Some ideas evolve instantaneously.  Others molt and transform themselves very gradually – and slowly enough to mapped.  The movement and change between a series of “frozen” monological compositions might portray a very different process than would anyone of them in isolation.  The mutual influence and responsiveness of monological composers to each other shows a much slower kind of dialogue (even if not a part of performance) than does collective improvisation.  A composer’s ensemble might be structured where each participant alternately takes turn in composing for the others.  Then, there’s also composing for improvisers.  This opens a whole other spectrum of possibilities — and a very, very important one.

Unlike an individual plant, animals aren’t bound to a single location.  A composer can go monological on Sunday, dialogical all day Monday and mix it all up on Tuesday.  Sometimes the sonic image gets some; sometimes the interaction does.  Sometimes they talk to each other and work it out for a while.  Every moment, every position in the spectrum says something, means something.  At least, none of them are neutral.

This staggered division of labor also introduces a capacity to expedite compositional control at a scale and precision that’s unattainable through ensemble improvisation.  More exacting correspondences between an imagined sonic ideal and its actualization in sound can be drawn within a composer’s reach.  But, in order to hold sounds so accountable to a composer’s ideal, their sonic image has also to stabilize.  Sounds and patterns must regularize and turn more dependably repeatable.  They depart from the changeable volatility of “event” into an emulation of what Amiri Baraka has disparagingly termed “artifact.”

Outside-in composing applies closed system dynamics in generating sonic imagery.  Sound bodies are conceived as finite quantities to be measured, divided up and ordered accordingly (and to limit variables in this way furthermore aids in optimizing compositional control).  This may offer one possible explanation as to why divisive structures, internal formal consistency and linear development from clear beginning to definite end have so come to predominate as indicators of appropriate and successful compositional practice for some practitioners.

Actual sound bodies fade as immediate environs for compositional choice and assume a new role as its terminal destination.  Sounds are cast as objects of observation, poised distant within a regard roughly analogous with a European Renaissance painter’s methodical launching of illustrated objects toward vanishing points.  In a curious inversion of the English art historian Walter Pater’s 19^th century suggestion, this system of organizing musical composition poses an instance of musical practice aspiring to the conditions of visual art.

Sound’s indigenous ephemerality, however, slips aside the relative endurance of sculpted stone or fresco.  In contrast with the ever so tangible, but potent, “leftover” that’s called “art object,” musical sound isn’t freestanding or “autonomous” in this way, but perpetually dependent on its enactment in performance.  However, if so desired, what might best approximate the hardscapes of visual artifact could be a recourse to repetition on a grand scale, a firm commitment to thorough re-enactment, to an acting out the ideal of the artifact, the “unchanging” object, as ritual (which, in contrast with play, would filter out unanticipated creative intrusions in advance).

When carefully deployed, outside-in strategies are able to yield sonic imagery of airbrushed, nearly hyperreal perfection, but such an achievement by itself doesn’t really represent some kind of apotheosis of musical possibility.  It articulates only one alternate proportioning of the complex tradeoffs negotiated among the conflicting interests of imagination, social organization and sound.  In this particular variety, performance is rendered as much commemoration as realization.

As with belated news of a long expired supernova, music’s generative compositional energy has been exiled to a remote, possibly forgettable (and even disposable) historical resting place.  The tensions among the inconclusive, the tentative and the decisive have long since transpired way off in some yesterday, to leave behind some potentially vivid, but unavoidably second hand news.

Nevertheless, a music’s sound and design may still (and often does) profoundly move a listener, but only along a one way street along which the music can neither move itself, hear or respond.  And conversely, beyond the narrowed options of dissent, disruption or displacement, neither listener nor performer may move the music either.  This is musical “composition” posed as sonic monument.

In the 21^st century, where automated repetition has turned so cheap and easy, it could seem hard to imagine that the archival taint that can now be so easily associated with current, Eurological “classical” practice, for example, might be persisting as an unintended consequence of what was, at the time of its earlier development, cutting edge innovation.  Living without high technologies for capturing and preserving sonic imagery, the fixed, replicable complex sonic patterns invented and developed by earlier European composers were most likely encountered as exceptional achievements amid a much more tenuously evanescent sonic world.

Not only did many of these composers improvise (even if that procedure was restricted to solo execution), their actual working conditions fared a good deal closer to Duke Ellington’s than to, say, Pierre Boulez (and in more ways than class and status).  Like Ellington, they were expected to constantly produce new material.  One’s “best” piece really did have to be one’s next piece.  They were way too busy looking ahead to be thinking in terms of bequeathing cryonic deposits for a future museum status.

All tradeoffs aside however, closed system composing allows a development of ideas and sound bodies that’s can’t be arrived at through open systems.  And there are many kinds of sonic images that can only be constructed through this kind of framework.  Some music can only be discovered from the inside out.  Other sonic imaginings can only be achieved through highly intensive planning and scripting.  Each specific conception has to appeal to whatever its most supportive methodology turns out to be.  In a pluralistic musical world, where no particular musical way can carry a last word, outside-in composing distinguishes itself as a very frequently visited and especially useful station along the sonic pathways.

Steve Lacy deftly contrasted these options in precisely 15 seconds: “In 15 seconds, the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what you want to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have 15 seconds.”

The cosmology within which a composer acts, the terms of action, the kinds of information available, the relationship with the sonic image, all differ radically, but musicians might easily snap from one end of this spectrum to the other just like that; and they’re additionally apt to organize a plethora of mixed strategies in relation with what it is they want to accomplish.

Improvisation is not a complete misnomer for situating the compositional process within sonic events as they unfold.  A composer has to integrate responses and anticipations toward what’s imprevisto, toward what’s unforeseen, as a given feature of the field of action.  A composer here weaves coherences amid an open system.  In physicist Ilya Prigonine’s notion of dissipative structures, the more coherent, the more interconnected an open system (and, in the case of music, the more communications effected), the more unstable it is — the more capable of (or liable to) sudden transformations.  Under these conditions, as the poet Charles Olson also relates in his essay Projective Verse: “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. …keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.”

Compositional immersion in the quick of the moment affords intimate access to, and direct rapport with, the fine local details of the actual sounds at hand — timing, timbre, envelope, emphasis – vital details of affective touch that can move deeply a listener’s attention, and which, taken all together, would be, in practical terms, simply too intricate to either average, map or delegate.

What comes along with such compositional intimacy is a necessity to respond inventively to whatever unannounced shifts happen to permeate a musical biosphere.  The fluctuating sonic imagery that’s so characteristic of music being composed in this way demonstrates the telling impact of the call and response exchanges that are so intrinsic to how open systems interact with their environment.

Improvisation as attitude — as an open system, give and take cosmology — as an ethos, relates (not so surprisingly) with a lot more than musical activity.  Albert Murray writes in The Hero and the Blues that “Improvisation is the ultimate human (i.e. heroic) endowment. It is, indeed; and even as flexibility or the ability to swing (or to perform with grace under pressure) is the key to that unique confidence which generates the self-reliance and thus the charisma of the hero, and even as infinite alertness-become-dexterity is the functional source of the magic of all master craftsmen, so may skill in the art of improvisation be that which both will enable contemporary man to be at home with his sometimes tolerable but never quite certain condition of not being at home in the world and will also dispose him to regard his obstacles and frustrations as well as his achievements in terms of adventure and romance.”

But, from the point of view of crafting an audible sonic image that’s faithful to an imagined one, improvisation also freights a good share of inconveniences, liabilities and lacks.  Improvisers may willingly choose to compose within acutely abrupt horizons; but in having situated themselves inside (rather than outside) a musical event, composers can only act from where they actually are at any moment, at most passingly with the beginning of an event and only briefly with its end along the way.  Musical information continues to shift throughout, perpetually contingent and imperfect. A profound influence might be effected through adroit blendings of cooperation and counterstatement, but any total control over a global sonic narrative is simply not in the cards for any participant — and it can’t be.  Accurate knowledge of an evolving and still indeterminate soundscape can never be more than provisional and speculative.  These are the both limiting and liberating conditions that shape the context and basis within which instantaneous musical invention asserts itself.

Completely out in the open, improvisation radically exposes compositional process and ensconces it without retroactive safety nets within a series of irreversible actions and commitments.  Coherence and presence have to be achieved adaptively and cumulatively.  And the debris of improvised music’s construction – its scaffolds, its hesitations, mistakes, digressions, experiments and reassessments — splays openly within unforgiving earshot.  All of this, together with the composers’ responses, assembles what narratives greet a listener.

The doubts intrinsic to improvisation, its continual spar and dance with approaching vortices of unresolved probabilities enact a drama immediately inhabitable by listeners and composers alike in a way that all can share a stake in the outcome.  This shared intensification of expectancy can become a collective achievement.  And, given its dicey, if not occasionally adverse, circumstances, it’s not all that surprising that persuasive composing from-the-inside-out smacks so much of miracle and revelation for both listener and composer in a way that vividly immerses all participants in the suspense and dynamism of creative process.

         A sonic persona constitutes a composer’s audible mask.  It’s an identity — as protagonistic as in theatre — that articulates an image of agent or actor; and it accomplishes this through neither words, gesture nor facial expression, but conjures this impression instead out of no more than sound alone.  Persona sounds the tip of a composer’s index finger: Listen here!  Listen to this!  Listen!  It articulates its presence through achieving a distinctive way of assembling sound, a pattern and flavor of compositional choices that establish a cumulatively recognizable identity.

Relatively stable sonic imagery that’s been collaboratively invented and maintained bit by bit by many contributors over time exerts more of a community persona, but this presents a persona nevertheless.  No one person in particular may be responsible for the music’s design, but regardless of this, the music has still been composed, and its sound chronicles as much discerning and preferring as would any other.  Likewise, interpretive performers, musicians whose choices supplement a predetermined sonic image, compose to the extent that their decisions modulate the quality and presence of the music they’re playing; and as with actors, there’s enough discretionary latitude in interpretation that many inspiring performers achieve uniquely identifiable personae of their own.

Where an interpretive performer cultivates persona through execution, a composer effects persona more through musical design, through choice of patterns and patterns of choice.   Sonic imagery doesn’t self generate, nor is it self-sustaining. It has always to be built, constructed, put together, composed.  Options have to be considered.  Decisions have to be made.  There are uncertainties — and there grows an ongoing dialogue with conditions.  What becomes audible from all this is not necessarily autobiography or self expression (however powerfully each composer’s peculiar affinities inevitably color these events).  What insinuates among the sounds is the relationships of all of these protagonists in interaction.

Individuals, however, are not at all disposable options. The resonance of the individual person that emerges in music derives from the topographical specificity and uniqueness of the intersection where that particular human being is happening.  The irregular, the unpredictable, the anomalous, the capacity to recognize, sort and integrate the random and surprise, the generative sources of new life in music originate, as elsewhere, with microcosmic individual exceptions to statistical averages.  The sounds that speak as an exception, as music, display an accrual of these individual divergences.  Musical sound resonates as distinctly personified sound.

Most musical bodies of sound manage to self-identify as “music.”  A listener doesn’t have to like a sound or even accept it as “music” for oneself, just acknowledge that it’s got to somehow qualify as “music” for somebody.  Somewhat less often are there sonic events (such as many of those fostered by John Cage, for example) that, rather than quite so explicitly identifying themselves as a sonic exception that could only indicate music,  have often to lean instead on institutional brackets to be introduced to musical attention. But, generally a listener usually doesn’t have to wonder too much whether some sounds are “music” or not because a musical sound body messages a distinctively social gesture that invites a listener to engage it face to face.  It invites a listener to compose along with it.

Musical sound might so engross a listener that many may rarely ever move their considerations beyond what a particular music can do for them (and how could anybody really enjoy listening without some occasion for self gratification anyhow?).  But a musical sound body’s very capacity to “self identify” derives from other avenues of access it presents.  Not so different from the way the shifting geometries of beach sand recount patterned motions of wind and water, musical sounds distinctively symptomize human activity; and this is why it so often draws the turns of the head that it does. Somebody’s doing something. People are doing something.  What’s up?  An alert uncertainty edging on wariness begins to tone attention, and for good reason too: any living system (and people especially) behaves just unpredictably enough to bear some watching out for.  Musical sounds consequently always pose news.

Sounds point back to their generating frictions.  And the sound of a human generated event points even farther back toward the people who’ve initiated these sounds.  A telltale whoness insinuates among sound’s acutely sensorial whatness.  Sonic images swell with forensic clues that both imply and trace the decision streams of their composers.

An overall sound may impart ambience, feel, tone, perhaps even mood; but the compositional choices marking and distinguishing a sound body are what deliver a music’s drama.  Imaginative, empathic, even speculative attention to the impacts of agency on musical sound can reach toward prospective “whys” behind sounds and into the inhabitable “what ifs” of music’s sonic fiction, wherein one might infer – and feel – the sensibilities and dispositions of minds (or even states of mind) other than one’s own.

Usually when people talk about “structure” in music, they’re referring only to relationships among sounds; they’re talking about sonic design, which is no trivial concern among musicians.  But there are other important structures that deeply affect and qualify a sonic image in music.  These are the structures of cooperation and communication among the people who generate the sound.

Likewise, the word composition in music talk usually refers only to sonic organization, but a lot more has to be composed than sonic relationships.  Something of a body politic has also to be composed for any music to happen.  People have to agree to cooperate.  Communication strategies and methods of coordination have to be worked out.  All of this together assembles a musical structure.  Musical composition’s organization is social as much as it is sonic.

Any musical composition enlists a social agreement in order to achieve its sound.  A working consensus gathers around which sounds are to be recognized as “the music” along with how people are to coordinate with each other while generating these sounds.  Each specific composition focuses the constitution of a equally specific (if provisional) sonic community.

Musical listening, for example, can be understood as amateur.  It’s consensual.  It’s voluntary.  And the word amateur itself means “one who loves.”  Love can’t be compelled.  And enthusiasm, (which means “having become inhabited by a god”) can’t be bought either.  An amateur attitude reaches as far as pleasure can — and then some.  People generate musical sound when they feel like it — and they don’t otherwise.  Shared enjoyment would best identify the prevailing destination of this mode of relationship.  But there are also other relatively unconditional, “gifting” practices of music that reach well beyond these immediate, amateur concerns with a “good time,” such as musics that actualize devotion, solidarity or medicinal intent.

In contrast with the consensual communities that can be developed through amateur activity, professional music participates in market relationships that are bounded by “no pay, no play” interactions.  These install a firewall between musical practice and the more unconditional loves that move an amateur; and the insulation introduces a wider range of options stretching all the way out into the mercenary.

A professional filter enables the role of musical fonctionnaire, where sounds are generated on the basis of external demand.  To purvey sounds this way isn’t really any less legitimate (or mundane) than any other job; but as a reductionist exercise of professional attitude, it marks where the professional departs most from the motivating concerns of either amateur or artist.

But in general, he impacts of professionalism figure a lot less narrowly and are often much more complicated than this.  When music’s actually able to attract resources such as income, a demand (as well as an opportunity) evolves for more labor intensive cultivations of craft and capacity that can enlarge everyone’s conception of what’s possible to achieve musically.

Artists draw on components of both amateur and professional orientations while reaping the contradictions.  An artist is a highly intensive amateur who allies the unconditional enthusiasm of the amateur with the discipline and skills applied by professionals (although most of these were probably invented by amateurs and artists in the first place).  Amateur and artist may both willingly volunteer their responsibilities toward music; but, while an amateur might regard professional standards of adequacy as an easily disposable option, an artistic disposition aspires instead to invent and contribute well beyond what would ordinarily be standard, passable, adequate or necessary.

Artistic attitude differs most importantly from either professional or amateur in that artists work more for the music than vice versa.  And such a potentially exhaustive commitment can wax pretty costly in terms of time, energy and labor.  Musicians therefore often turn to the professional sphere not only in order to support themselves (which is a professional value), but to support the music (which poses an artistic one).

But it’s pretty difficult to separate these two in practice. Despite that, the differences between professional and artistic attitude aren’t really trivial.  Push come to shove, the strictly professional has finally to prioritize personal gain over the music itself, whereas an artist chooses to act first as a music’s accomplice (with all the problems that might include).  And it’s not that individual musicians don’t change hats all the time just to stay in motion either.  It’s more a matter of being clear about what’s really important in each instance.

Given that plenty of creatively mediocre work can manage to thrive perfectly well in a professional sense, professional activity by itself isn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of any music’s “quality” or “value” (whatever these words might mean).   A lot of serious creative work has long persisted and continues to evolve well off the professional grid without at all qualifying for the sort of dilettantism that such a non-market or “amateur” status might imply.

These attitudes describe a repertoire of roles, different constellations of priorities, rather than fixed personal identities.  And whatever conflicts arise among these are even more likely to be lived as individual experiences than they are interpersonally.  In practice, actual musicians often inhabit various – even contradictory — amalgams of these alternate fields of intention (any of which might shift on a day to day basis).

The components of whatever mix could as easily support each other as conflict.  Amateurs who get paid are suddenly functioning professionally (which might not at all affect how they love what they do).  Amateurs or professionals may (or may not) play with the degree of care that derives from artistic attention.  The boundaries among these three scales of value are porous and pretty apt to fluctuate.

The spectrum that stretches from amateur to artist begins with an amateur’s personal joy in the doing of music (maybe even regardless of how the music sounds).  And everyone – absolutely everyone — starts here.  The more artistic scale of this spectrum doesn’t at all eliminate these joys, but augments them with a growing dedication to the welfare and life of music’s sound in a way that develops beyond personal indulgence into a reciprocal dialogue and responsibility.  Professional activity offers a vehicle capable of either supporting or abusing what’s achieved along this spectrum — as well as delivering varying mixtures of both at the same time.

Musicians serve as advocates for sound entities and their allied silences.  They act as liaisons who introduce sounds to expectancy and midwife music into audibility.  They work around corners of the heard and the not-heard.  They have to listen wide in both directions.  They’re bound to practice multiple allegiances through having to coordinate the contrasting (and often disparate) interests of sound, craft, imagination, and listeners.  Yet, this position doesn’t leave that much room for impartiality because musical actions can’t become so hypothetical as to turn abstract.  They really have to make a difference or they’ll just get lost (and if they’re not cared about, they aren’t going to matter, anyway).  Musicians commit to actual sounds and their consequences.

The presence (or prospect) of a listener — the pressure and pull of that focused waiting that could be called expectancy — activates a musical arena with restless, destabilizing, gravitational currents that each sound has to address upon entering into music.  Neutrality’s not an available option.  Musical sounds assert amid uncertainties that always promise opportunities for failures.  They have to dance among vagaries of attention, among she-loves-me-she-loves-me-nots, among with-its and not-with-its, among persuasion, seduction, resistance, distraction, defiance.  Worlds are already in motion.  Sounds already present their own character.  So do listeners.  There isn’t any blank slate from which a musician may begin.

Even a musician who happens to be composing in isolation at a particular moment is therefore never really alone or asocial, working “only for oneself,” because, as a community language and project, music’s mode of address is a constitutionally convivial and public one.  Musicians inevitably engage beyond “self” in their responsibilities to the sound entities and unsounded motions with whom they‘re collaborating.  This fulfills a symbiotic partnership that furthers music’s evolution and continuing subsistence.

As an action, music engages listening, imagination and sounding.  There’s a networking of relationships and interactions among perceptions, imaginings, feelings, calculations, sensuosities, social cooperations and techniques.  But, without what’s ordinarily considered “the music” — which is to say, its sound and sonic image — there’d be no musical activity whatsoever.  At the same time, despite this pivotal indispensability, these very same sounds depend absolutely on the nurturings of musical action in order to exist as music at all.

Music is something that happens to sound; and the actions that are also music spin themselves around, over and in sounds.  Sound harbors musical activity’s focal transportation hub.  Everything orients toward and through this.  Yet, even though actual sounds are so immediately palpable, “the music” isn’t  residing exactly in these “sounds in themselves” (and neither can we do without them).  The relationships with, around and among sounds combine in generating the event that we often come to call “music.”  All of these, together with sound, collaborate music.

         Sound that proposes music invokes expectancy; and expectancy bathes the possibility of music with the light of attention, with a consent to wait and a willingness to meet.  A moment of music accomplishes a tenuous and very fragile consensus within which participants transform what they hear while becoming themselves transformed.  A dedication to listening such as this might open a transport into altered states.  And conversely, far more than any other predisposition, it’s indifference that’s most capable of dissolving such gatherings, such doings, as music.  When cast beyond the reach of caring, musical sounds disperse into incidental noise.