Beyond The 'Crisis of Material' - Chris Dench's "Funk"

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Beyond the 'crisis of material': Chris Dench's “Funk”
Richard Toop
Online Publication Date: 01 January 1995

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Beyond the 'Crisis of Material':

Chris Dench's "Funk"
Richard Toop
Chris Dench's Funk (1989)'for contra-alto clarinet and percussion marks a new stage in the composer's
technical evolution; virtually every aspect of the composition is derived, in caballistic manner, from the
name of its dedicatee, the New York funk/rap artist Afrika Bambaataa.
KEYWORDS Composition technique, cabbala.
for Andrea
An earlier study of Chris D e n c h ' s w o r k 1 dated from a period (around 1986) w h e n

the composer was wrestling with his lack of conviction in received ideas of
'musical material' as a useful basis for his o w n work. Pieces like Enoncd, Tilt a n d
Afterimages were all, in their various ways, personal responses to that "material
crisis' - their dense textures were, a m o n g other m o r e positive things, a m e a n s of
avoiding the "material' problems p o s e d b y exposed single lines. In recent works,
notably Sulle Scale della Fenice for solo flute a n d Funk for contra-alto clarinet a n d
percussion, he feels that the "crisis" has b e e n overcome, and that he has f o u n d a
new, personally satisfying m e a n s of generating the u n b r o k e n melodic lines of
which his w o r k has always, at bottom, consisted.
In the years since Afterimages, D e n c h has led a s o m e w h a t nomadic life, m o v i n g
f r o m Brighton to northern Italy, a n d thence to Berlin, on a DAAD Residency. H e
has n o w exchanged h e m i s p h e r e s as well as continents; since early 1990 he has
been living in Sydney, Australia, w h e r e the interviews reproduced in various
forms below took place. 2
Dench uses the terms 'musical material'
in the sense that if y o u create a musical phrase, it legitimises all sorts of other
musical phrases which relate to it in satellite fashion. If y o u lose faith in that,
in the efficacy of musical intervals as meaningful atoms of a musical
discourse, then inevitably the whole pack of cards falls apart, a n d y o u ' r e left
with the unwillingness to write a n y t h i n g that has to do with traditional
Richard Toop, Four Facets of the 'New Complexity' in Contact 32 (London, Spring 1988), pp. 4-50,
(in particular pp. 19-30).
2 Unless otherwise indicated, all the quotations in this article stem from conversations with Chris
Dench (Feb./May 1990), or from a seminar at the Sydney Conservatorium (28.3.1990). This
analysis was written in 1990; since then Dench has written a number of works using compositional
procedures analogous to those described below. Notable among these are Closing Lemma (1991) for
solo flute, and several ensemble pieces: Driftglass (1991), Quattro frammenti (1991), "atsiluth (1992),
Planetary Allegiances (1993) and Heterotic Strings (I993). Since early 1994, Dench, who has now
taken Australian citizenship, has been living in Melbourne.
85
86 R. Toop
musical concepts.., and as a result I really had to start from scratch, and
start finding other paradigms which I could import into what I was doing to
supply an internal raison d'etre.
The importations, in pieces like Enonc~and Afterimages, were partly extra-musical,

coming from anything from literary theory to astrophysics; but they also involved
finding
a whole range of ways of making music in such a fashion that the actual
content is secondary to the mass effect overall. That was one way of avoiding
the problem of the individual material: I didn't have any trust in it, so what
I did was layer it in such a way that what you achieve is a wire wool effect:
if you disentangle any one piece it's not very interesting, but put together,
they get entangled, and represent something with an extraordinary inner life.
In the long run, this wasn't a satisfactory solution: it led to a monolithic approach
to form, permitting plenty of detail but not that much subtlety at either the macro-
or micro-level.
A change in attitude was partly conditioned by external circumstances, namely
Dench's marriage to the Australian flautist Laura Chislett. At this period he had
been wary of writing pieces for solo instruments (a piece for bass clarinet, written
at the same time as Enonc~ was "an unmitigated disaster" and was hastily
withdrawn), but
when I was asked to write a flute piece by my wife, I thought, well, I've got
to do this, and with that decision, I had to reappraise my whole approach to
working with material. The direction this reappraisal took grew out of my
conviction of the importance of music as a medium of epiphany, and not as
an arbitrary choice.
Be that as it may, the reappraisal took a curious form: the conversion of names into
musical material. The procedure has a long ancestry, reaching back to Josquin
(Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae) and probably beyond, and passing via Bach and
Schumann to more recent composers such as Messiaen (the notorious "commu-
nicable language" of the Meditations) and Kagel, not to mention the flood of
"tributes' unleashed by Paul Sacher's 75th birthday (Boulez, Holliger et al.). Dench
had not been overly impressed by any of these tributes (he also cites George
Newson's "To the Edge of Doom"), but it
didn't seem to me to be such a bad idea if perhaps it were handled in a way

related to the Jewish Cabbala. So I started converting the names of people I
liked into musical material. It seems to me that proper names fall through the
Saussurian grid of the linguistic signifier being arbitrary. So I looked to them
as a means of revivifying what I was doing, investing it with a particular
internal meaning. I'm not suggesting that the material per se suddenly comes
to have a greater significance; what I mean is that because I'm imbuing the
material with an immanent underlying quality - namely that it is symbolic of
the name that gives rise to it - it invests the music with a meaning which it
would not have had if I had simply achieved it through the permutation of
arbitrary material.
Beyond the Crisis of Material 87
This has, of course, a certain mystical underlay. But even at a more prosaic level
the use of the 'loved name" can presumably instil into the creative process not only
a certain personal warmth, but also a sense of ethical accountability. In his essay
The Heart's Algorithms, 3 discussing creativity within a syncronously conceived
society, Dench writes of "an ethical responsibility, anonymously discharged, with
no recourse to debates of aesthetics; the artists" productions are either efficacious
or they are not, and life continuing depends on the difference."
The new approach found its way furtively in Afterimages, where some of the
percussion 'hotspots', as the composer calls them, are based on the name Laura
Chislett. The first major exposition of the new method comes with Dd/ploy~ for
solo piccolo, where the generative name is that of Laura Chislett's teacher, the
Italian flautist Roberto Fabbriciani. Dd/ployd was, among other things, an
immediate response to Italy, where Dench went on leaving England
in final disgust over a whole lot of things like the new Thatcher government
that we all knew was inevitable, and a temporary rupture with my
publishers.
What D~/ployd represents, however, is not just a change in method, but also in
attitude, which Dench portrays as as partial move towards (non-Anglo-Saxon!)
"culture' (as opposed to the "nature" of Enoncd and Afterimages), and thus a kind of
"new subjectivity" (not tO be confused with neo-Romanticism!):
I did feel a very strong sense of a new departure, and Dd/ploy~ is, I suspect,
one of my very best things. It is the first piece in which the n e w paradigm
of holographic material begins to appear. There is a return to values which
are not simply those of astrophysics and the like - there is actually a return
to the idea of the behaviour of pitches being meaningful. But I still am not
relying on culturally received notions of music in the governing of these
things: the mechanics are derived from a whole lot of other areas, such as
cabbalism, and topology.
So a new spirit is apparent not least in the fact that Maestro Fabbriciani has to
-
share his homage with (so the score's preface has it) "the swallows and
nightingales - and bats of La Pieve a Bozzone'" (though doesn't that suggest a
return to 'nature' rather than "culture'?...). This doesn't mean, however, that
Dench's previous remorseless self-marginalisation within the compositional pro-
cess is a thing of the past - it remains, but at a far less masochistic level:
It feels to me, when I am doing the pieces, that I am not really mediating any
more than is absolutely necessary, and that what I am attempting to do is to
create an environment in which certain behaviours are inevitable. So that
when I have created the structural force-fields which are actually "the piece',
the way that the notes then get scattered-in to flesh the thing out and give
it its life seem to me to be inevitable, and the direct outcome of this kind of
pre-planning. If it appears to be idiosyncratic, then that actually persuades
3 Chris Dench, The Heart'sAlgorithms (BerFm1989).

88 K Toop
me that I have succeeded, because I've managed to make the naturalness of

the way the two things interact a central component of the piece.
Implicit in this is a certain holistic quest, and in this respect Dench has been greatly
impressed by Gregory Bateson's writings, which form the starting point for an
essay, The Pattern which Connects, 4 that seeks to represent a musical composition
as, in Batesonian terms, a mental process. A focal point of this essay is the
declaration that
I approach the duster of phenomena that constitute a 'piece of music' as if

it were a living thing, an organism, capable of limited internal adaptation
without forgoing its integrity, and it is for this reason that I call it a 'mind',
and not 'mind-like'. I am not suggesting merely that there is a metaphorical 9
resemblance between music and mind, but that the prior is a formal
equivalent of the latter.
This is not the place to debate such notions; the point is that they signal a new
confidence in the personal scope of the compositional act. To date this confidence
has been articulated primarily through a remarkable series of compositions for solo
flute, written for Laura Chislett. The most important of these is Sulle Scale della
Fenice, of which Dench says:
it even has a metaphorical smile on its face which is the consequence of

everything within it having gone right, and that gives the whole piece a
certain kick.
For Dench, the path opened up by the recent solo works, and by Sulle Scale in
particular, is
the exercise of the constant redirection of the material, of a perpetual

unfoldingness that is not predictable at any moment. Sulle Scale is totally
rigorous, and one can extrapolate from any one note what's going to happen
with any other note. But the great thing is that it doesn't operate like that;
even though I know what the piece is doing, and how it's doing it, and why
9it's doing it, I can still hear the music with an innocent ear that allows me to
hear its "waywardness': its unfolding, unfettered novelty.
It is this trajectory that is pursued in Funk.
Apropos Funk: an Introduction and Conversation
In 1984, a first piece entitled Funk was composed at the request of the director of
the La Rochelle Festival; this piece, for bass clarinet, was the "'unmitigated
disaster" alluded to earlier. With Dench, unrequited titles tend to be recycled, and
when conversations with clarinettist Henri Bok led to a request for a piece for his
Duo Contemporain (clarinet(s) and percussion), the name Funk was duly trans-
4 Chris Dench, The Pattern which Connects, in Ossia 2 (Sydney 1990).
ferred to the new project, which was begun in Rassina in June 1988, and
completed in January 1989 in Berlin.
The 'funk' origins of this second piece, like its predecessor, lie in a number of
albums released in 1984 (and still in the composer's possession) by artists such as
Thomas Dolby, John Lydon (alias Johnny Rotten, of Sex Pistols fame), Bill Laswell
and, above all, the New York funk/rap artist Afrika Bambaataa, who supplies the
basic name for Dench's musical cabbalisms. Other homages are also inherent in
the piece: to John Coltrane, and to the Miles Davis of the mid-seventies albums, s
Other salient information of a non-analytic character emerged in conversation
with composer:
CD: . . . the reason it was called Funk is firstly because I like the word's
brevity. I also like the ambiguity of its spelling (people from abroad tend to
ask you what you just said), and the narrow distance it is from vulgarity. For
me that's quite a treat, because having been brought up as a good middle
class boy I always get a certain thrill out of provocation, and it's certainly
meant to be provocative. And it's quite obvious that one of the things I really
go for is aggression. I don't like the more wimpy funk music, though that can
be nice in a passive sort of way; ordinarily I like funk that is genuinely
violent. I like the two poles: when it's very funny, like Parliament, and I
relish it when when it's utterly humourless, as in Miles Davis. Davis doesn't
know what joy is, he has no conception of humour: he's 'black' beyond all
imagination, spiritually, and that's what gives him his edge. I think it's
precisely that polarity that my piece contains: whimsical nihilism.
RT- You once talked about the piece having shamanistic qualities. How
does that square with 'funk'?
CD: Afrika Bambaataa regards himself as a social leader, and is regarded as

such within the so-called Zulu Nation of Harlem. Thus, he is almost a
spiritual leader, because in his culture there is far less distinction between life
and worship than there is in our own. That would seem to be one of the
reasons, though it's not a conscious one.
RT: There are obvious 'evangelical' traits in some of the Afrika Bambaataa
tracks; might that carry across, at a subliminal level?
CD- Look, m y music is evangelical! It is nothing else, in a sense.
RT: Evangelical on behalf of what?
CD: On behalf of things we've often talked about on other occasions. For
example, the fact that it's quite possible to be deeply involved in the notion
of humanity's spiritual life, and yet be totally non-theistic. The point is that
spirituality is something that people have and do; so as a composer, whether
5 In the preface to the score of Funk, Dench particularly refers to Coltrane's Ascension and
Interstellar Space, as well as "the whole series of orchestrally-conceivedfunk albums.., from Silent
Way to Pangaia and beyond."
90 R. Toop
I like it or not, I'm involved in that having and doing. And so the pieces,
unless I deliberately decide to somehow make them abstract, are going to
take on that character. In a sense all music is, by that token, religious; and the
reason for doing a piece like Funk is as much as anything to try and marry
up every conceivable trend that runs through myself.
RT" The score contains quotations from Thomas 'Dolby and Ludwig
Wittgenstein (a startling coupling!) which suggest other meanings of 'funk'.
CT: The Wittgenstein is a deliberate red herring on my part. It has nothing

to do with the piece; it's there to thicken the plot - to direct one away from
the music, not towards it.
RT: Like Magritte's "This is not a pipe"?
CD: Exactly; and like Foucault. 6 Whereas Thomas Dolby is very close to the
piece, because he made the "Hyperactive" single just as I was writing the
first Funk piece, and I loved that song. I still do: it's a fantastic song. Like me,
he is a middle-class Englishman who has done everything in his power to
shake off that origin, and I find the witty-send-ups he creates of the same
funk world I was trying to capture very satisfying. He also mentions being
thrown out of school, and I've had this experience three times: mainly for
being "funky" in this sense, that I was thrown out of my first educational
establishment because they weren't giving me anything I wanted, so I wasn't
doing any work - I wanted to write music.
RT: So it's funk as 'flunk', t o o . . . What about the other meaning, of

shrinking back in panic?
CD: The idea of panic is always strong, because in a way I am a paranoid

character, and I think my pieces embody a certain paranoid component. Not
in a Dali-esque sense, but when I listen to my pieces I really can hear a high
level of anxiety coded into them - particularly in pieces like Afterimages. A n d
the police whistle in the middle of this piece is a rather oblique kind of
reference to that.
RT: Why did you choose that particular gesture to separate the two parts of
the piece?
CD: Oh, partly because John Coltrane and Miles Davis were users of
narcotics, and they worked in New York clubs which were forever being
raided.
RT: A last question on the notion of 'funk': you've often talked about how
you start a piece meaning to do something, and time after time you don't get
round to doing it, or shrink back from doing it. Can that too be legitimately
read into the title?
6 MichelFoucault, This is not a pipe, Universityof California Press (Berkeley1982).

CD: No. This of all m y pieces seems to me to be the most complete in terms
of its doing what it set out to do. Not entirely, even now, but about the most
complete. In that sense it is also the riskiest thing I have done.
Analysis
Funk is a 9-minute piece for contra-alto clarinet and percussion. The choice of the
contra-alto clarinet, which the composer describes as "not so much the Ugly
Duckling of the clarinet family - more like the Woolly Mammoth", has various
grounds. Firstly, Dench has a certain preference for the E fiat members of the
clarinet family, which he finds "more abrasive" in tone than the B fiat instruments.
As for the contra-alto: "it's not quite as thudding as the contrabass clarinet, but it's
a bit more lugubrious than the bass". There are problems; quite apart from the fact
that not all clarinettists have a contra-alto in the cupboard, it's likely that those
who do own such an instrument will tend, precisely, to leave it in the cupboard,
because it has so little repertoire. Consequently, the chances of players having the
same level of technical fluency on the contra-alto as on the better-known
instruments are not, on the whole, good. In the case of Funk, the composers' initial
assumption that the same virtuoso style could be applied to the entire range turned
out to be unduly optimistics; as a result, the more extravagant passages had to be
reconceived in a way that avoided the perfect fifth at the top the range.
The percussion instrumentation is, at one level, more familiar: it's an expanded
drum kit. The expansion is, needless to say, considerable:
5 tomtoms 2 brake blocks chinese cymbal

5 cymbals 2 small suspended bells 2 tamtams
5 woodblocks 2 bongos whip or slapstick
5 cowbells 2 timbales police/referee's whistle
logdrum bass drum crotale
but as with a drum kit, sensible substitutions are possible. At one level, this
essentially unpitched ensemble provides a "counter-world' to the clarinet; but at
another, it too is concerned with a basic 'scale' extending from low to high - in
fact, in terms ,of timbre, the percussionist's part forms a progression from (as
Dench puts it) dark and mellow to shrill". 7 And not only rhythmic procedures but
to some extent gestural elements too are common to both 'worlds'.
The duration of 9 minutes is a composer's choice, operating 'downwards' into
the structure, rather than being the outcome of adding up shorter lengths. Chris
Dench says:
"'Something I always know w h e n I start a piece is the feasible time-space it

can occupy (and one of the most irritating things is w h e n pieces sometimes
just will not be the length they are supposed to be): I very distinctly did not
7 This is particularlyevident in the use of "'coperti'" on the tomtoms - small squares of cloth
which are flickedaway in the course of sections I and K - and the gradual tendency from playing
on the dome of the cymbals to playing on the edge.
92 g Toop
want to create a quarter-of-an hour monster for clarinet and percussion,

because that struck me as something that no audience would be able to sit
through."
At this stage it is necessary to bring into play the 'generative name' Afrika
Bambaataa. Using names in the way Dench does, respect and/or affection has to
be combined with a certain degree of practicality. Since erich letter of the name is
going to be converted (according to its position within the alphabet) into lengths
of time which make up the subsections of the work, at least three criteria need to
be met:
a. there need to be a manageable number of letters (anything below 10 or
above 20 might be a liability);
b. there must be a suitable blend of variety and symmetry;
c. there need to be a fair number of letters from the beginning of the
alphabet, so that there can be some short sections, and a fair level of
contrast between short and long.
As we shall see, "Afrika Bambaataa' meets these criteria admirably (much better
than "Miles Davis" or "John Coltrane', for instance). Reduced to its basic numerical
form, it yields:
A F R I K A B A M B A A T A A
1 6 18 9 11 1 2 1 13 2 1 1 20 1 1
Figure 1
At this stage, the composer starts to analyse the formal implications of the
material. There are two words, therefore two main sections. Though the second
will clearly have more subsections than the first (9 as opposed to 6), addition of the
letters in each word shows that the second section will actually be slightly shorter
than the first ('Afrika' = 46, 'Bambaataa' = 42). Overall there are 88 units, which if
one takes a unit to equal 6 seconds, comes out very close to 9 minutes (10 units per
minute). A survey of the lengths of sections looks like this:
Length of individual sections
Letter A F R I K A * B A M B A A T A A
Number 1 6 18 9 11 ! 2 1 13 2 1 1 20 1 1
Number x6" 6" 36" 108" 54" 66" 6" 12" 6" 78" 12" 6" 5" 120" 6" 6"
(-duration) [ [ [ I 'medium"
'long' l
* The 'missing' 12" (fromnine minutes) are supplied by the police-whistlepause between 'Afrika' and
'Bambaataa'
Figure 2
At this stage, Dench makes a further quasi-analytical decision: he divides these

lengths into three distinct categories, t o be treated in different ways. The
distinctions are evidence enough: there are 'short" sections (A, B), 'medium'
sections (F, I,K, M - since these occur in order of increasing length, Dench treats
them as a 'cut continuum'), and 'long' ones (R, T), the long ones (both of which
have their own particular formal/registral strategies) being conveniently located as
structural pillars near the beginning and end of the work.
These two number sequences - in ascending order, 1 1 6 9 11 18 for Afrika
and 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 13 20 for Bambaataa - are "nested' at various further levels
within this broad structure. The first result of this is to determine the bar-lengths
and metronome markings for each section. The first two sections (A and F) involve
relatively simple applications of the general method. In the A section, there are
1 + 6+ 18 + 9 + 11 + 1 ( = 46) semiquavers to be placed within 6 seconds. On the
one hand, this produces the following sequence of bar-lengths:
A F R I K A
1 3 9 9 11 1
:-g 1-g 1--g
Figure 3
On the other hand, the location of 46 semiquavers within 6 seconds means

that, since 46 ,~ -- 11.5 J , and 6 seconds is 1/10th of a minute, the tempo is
,~ = 1 1 5 ,~n.5
' T x ~ ~- 115). The same process (46 pulses within 36 seconds) gives F a
'reference tempo" of ~ -~~46X~ = c. 76.
However, this section already brings some problems and complications which
need to be addressed at this point. The most obvious one is this: one can't treat a
section of 108" or 120" the same way as a section of 6", overlooking the fact that
it just happens to be twenty times as long. Within the space of 6" one can
accurately perceive a set of six well-defined lengths, and one can also perceive the
whole duration, if so desired, as comprising a single phrase or phase. Clearly,
neither of these holds good over a span of two minutes. To put it more drastically,
a process which may be highly interesting when projected over 6 seconds will
probably be stupefyingly dull (if perceptible at all) when projected over two
minutes.
So at this stage, Dench's task is to decide at what duration new 'rules' of metrical
subdivision are going to be brought in, and what these rules are going to be. Of
course, that decision can't be made in purely abstract terms: it depends to a large
degree on what kind of material is going to fill each bar length (and given this
particular composer's predeliction for a music without gaps, "fill" is to be taken
literally).
The answer is this: in both the clarinet and percussion parts, each bar will be
filled with 6 ('Afrika') or 9 ('Bambaataa') attacks, based - in a way to be described
below - on modifications and permutations of the numbers derived from the
letters. Dench's solution is that, with the exception of the 'k' bar in section F, every
94 R. Toop
bar lasting over 8 seconds is subdivided into six smaller bars (with 'Afrika'
proportions). Even this process produces, in the longest bars, single durations of
over 8", which are subjected to yet further internal divisions.
We should n o w look a little more methodically at the procedures governing the
time structure of the AFRIKA part of the work (i.e. roughly the first half). Dench
uses a simple permutation system to ensure that in each of the six major sections
of this AFRIKA part, the six component lengths s h o w n above in Figure I (1, 1, 6,
9, 11, 16) occur in a different sequence. The result is shown in Figure 4; the column
on the right is a reminder of the different overall durations into which these
sequences are fitted.
A F R I K A2 Duration
A 1 6 18 9 11 1 6"
F 6 11 1 @ 1 9 36"
A2 1 9 1 11 18 6 6"
(circled numbers last over 8", and therefore involve further subdivisions)
Figure 4 Permutation of AFRIKAcomponents
The permutation process (incidentally, it's one that Stockhausen used in his
Klavierstficke V-VIII) operates as follows: the letters A A F I K R are n u m -
bered from 1-6 (with the second A as 2), and the various lines arrived at by
addition m o d 6: this is s h o w n in Figure 5.
1 3 6 4 5 2 A F R I K A2
3 5 2 6 1 4 F K A2 R A I
6 2 5 3 4 1 R A2 K F I A
4 6 3 1 2 5 = I R F A A2 K
5 1 4 2 3 6 K A I A2 F R
2 4 1 5 6 3 A2 I A K R F
Figure 5 BasicAFRIKA 6-square
In each of the subsections of the first part - A-F-R-I-K-A 2 - there is a sequence

of 6 bars, whose lengths derive from the permutation of basic letter-numbers
shown in Figure 5. As indicated earlier, if any of these bars has a duration of more
than 8", it is subdivided into 6 smaller bars, whose length and order d e p e n d on
two factors: the position within the main 6-bar sequence, and the use of so-called
sliders. If a bar requiring subdivision occurs at the beginning of a sequence (as at
the beginning of sections R, I and K), the relative sizes of the 6 n e w mini-bars are
ordered 1 3 6 4 5 2 - - A F R I K A 2. If the subdividable bar occurs as the
second of a 6-bar sequence (e.g. the second "bar' of section I), then the sequence
of sizes i s 3 5 2 6 1 4 = F K A 2 R A I, and so forth.
The concept of sliders (which we will also encounter at a lower structural level
in the rhythmic structure of single bars) requires a little more explanation. In
Dd/ployd, the first piece to make comprehensive use of 'secret names', Dench had
already realised that the 'nesting' of the same discrete proportions into every level
of the rhythmic structure was (a) impractical and (b) uninteresting. Accordingly, he
devised sliding scales of v a l u e s in which the original n u m b e r sequence was the
most differentiated, and various degrees of "gradient" Served to "flatten'or smooth
out the level of difference between values. In a way, this is analogous to what
Stockhausen did with the pitches in Mantra, where the basic "formula" is subject
to various systematically deployed "expansions'. With Dench, however, this
process operates in the opposite direction - reducing differences, rather than
exaggerating them.
For the AFRIKA element of Funk, the slider scheme is as follows:
R K I F Ax2 Sum
(18 11 9 6 1)
1 1 1 1 1 6
2 1 1 1 1 7
3 1 1 1 1 8
4 1 1 1 1 9
5 2 1 1 1 11
6 2 2 1 1 13
7 2 2 1 I 14
8 2 2 2 1 16
9 3 3 2 1 19
10 3 3 2 1 20
11 4 3 2 1 22
12 5 4 3 1 26
13 6 4 3 1 28
14 7 5 3 1 31
15 8 6 4 1 35
16 9 7 4 1 38
17 10 8 5 1 42
18 11 9 6 1 46
(Similar schemes are used for the 9s (Bambaataa) and 15s (Afrika-Bambaataa))
Figure 6 Slider Scheme
96 R. Toop
The subdivided AFRIKA bars use the slider range 7-18. The overall bar and
bar-subdivision scheme for the first part of Funk is as follows:
[
a a f r • k i a
1 6 18 9 11 i I }
k a
11 18
392113
irfaac
R r a k f i a
18 1 11 6 9 1 -3
I ~I 1058 11191618
a f r i ]r ra kfls faak kaiaf r
i r a
,18 1 11
2 11 3 4 I 2 2 1 ~ I 2 1518461 313102
f r i k a f k a r a i rakfla iak rf
F a
11 1 18
1 313461i 712121 3131210 li5 i a 7 ~ 3
f r ika rakfia kaiafr a k rf
T. a i a k r f
1 9 1 11 18 6
Figure 7 Metrical s c h e m e for AFRIKA section.

Circled mini-bars last 8" or m o r e , a n d are t h u s subject to a further level o f s u b d i v i s i o n .
Now let's go a dimension further down into the structure: to the level that actually
generates some of what happens within each bar. Within each bar, each player has
6, 9 or 15 attacks. The choice of numbers is partly a matter of free compositional
design, but it also relates to the length of the bars, and the length of the individual
subsection. The distribution for the 1st (AFRIKA) part looks like this:
Major divisions (cf. Fig.l) A (ffi6") F (-36") R (-108")

Subdivisions (cf. Fig. 2) AFRIKA FKAR AI R AK F
Secondary subdivisions irfaak[ afrlka rakflairfaak
No, of attacks (clarinet) 666666 66666666666 9999996999999999999 i
No. of attacks (percussion) 1 66 6 6 1999991919991999219
SD I A I R F AAK AI A
frika rakfia
CT 9999996 666666 66666666666~66666666 666666 666666
PC 9 2 9 2 9 9 I 6156 9 9 6156 9L151 9 6 6 [ | |6 6 1 6156 6159 9 61 p56 9 6 9 61
A(~") ]
SD F R AIAKRF
~iI kalafralakrf
666666666666 666666
66626E 615615159 ~----6-=J 6
Figure 8 Dis~ibution of attacks per bar in AFRIKA section.

The broad strategies are clear enough: the clarinet distributions are simple, those
for the percussion more complex. The clarinet has a uniform 6 attacks per bar, with
the exception of the R section, where all but the two A subsections have 9 attacks
per bar. The treatment of the percussion is, of course, more varied, but is stiff fairly
systematic. Leaving aside the ls and 2s, which are an externally imposed set of
tam-tam and choke-cymbal punctuations, the choices fo.r each section are as
follows:
A: no percussion
F: 6 attacks for F, I and K, and the r sub-bar of R
R: 9 attacks for all except the A sub-sections and a sub-bars
I: a sliding scale, dependent on the lengths of sub-sections and sub-bars;
schematically (subject to a few modifications) it can be shown as:
A F I K R
a - - - 6 6
f - 6 6 6 9
i - 6 6 6 9
k - 9 9 6! 9
r - 15 15 15 15
K: same principle as I, but with values 'slid' slightly upwards
A: 6 attacks spread between the first 5 bars, and 6 in the last.
The results are infinitely more varied than this schematic presentation m a y
suggest, partly through the vastly discrepant bar-lengths, and partly through the
operation of the 'sliders'. A simple example of how Funk works is provided by the
first page of the score, which consists of the entire initial A section, and the first
bar of F.
Before going into details, however, let's digress for a moment, and consider
some broader issues arising from the score itself. Extravagant, unusually detailed
"expression markings' are a hallmark of the British 'complexists" - this is one of the
more obvious examples of a 'Ferneyhough legacy'. In other pieces, such as Sulle
Scale della Fenice, these indications are, in a sense, afterthoughts: " a n instruction
to the performer to give them an immediate insight: it saves them from sitting
down with a piece and poring over it to try and worm out its meaning. I'm giving
them a kind of hint - it's like a crossword clue; but it doesn't tell you exactly what's
there."
In Funk the situation is a little different. As the sketches confirm, the piece has
a certain psychological programme which is embodied in the verbal markings. The
overall 'emotional profile' is as follows:
A ANXIOUSLY, WITH A PREOCCUPIED EXPRESSION*
F parlando e poco sotto voce: claustrophobically
poco sotto voce, but "snarly": menacing!
R sinister and veiled - suddenly expressively -
sinister and veiled, again - brighter - quiet again
I 'menacing' again: poco sotto voce
insistent, obsessional - brighter - insistent, tightening - quieter
98 R, Toop
K - - - tightening again - "ecstatically"

A - - - (pesante)
B As if a hesitant pre-echo of A-type material - nervously - h u s h e d
M - - - suddenly hushed! - suddenly much more vigorous: growing!

B once again, a pre-echo of A-material
A raucously, stridently - gentler - raucous again
A come prima
T SLIMY AND UNCOUTH! - GRANDILOQUENT* - a little less overdone
A - - - quiet, pensive
A quieter still - very quiet
* capital letters as in the score
The instructions reveal clear introvert/extrovert contrasts between the two main
parts of the work - contrasts which crystallise in the two longest sections - R and
T. Equally revealing, though, are the references to 'A-material', which implies an
a priori characterisation of the material associated with the various sections (the
two B-sections are viewed, in effects, as dilated - and thus diluted - A-sections).
The dynamic levels, which are not systematised, are chosen to reinforce the basic
character of each section.
The flurry of grace-notes in the first bar also calls for particular comment. As in
previous works such as D6/ploy~ and Sulle Scale, m a n y notes within a given
rhythmic structure emerge (even after the 'smoothing-out" effect of the sliders)
with a theoretical duration of less than one fourteenth of a second. All such
durations are regarded by Dench as "sub-atomic", and are therefore notated as
grace-notes.
N o w let's look at the concrete results. Each of the 6 bars of the A 1 section has
6 notes in the clarinet part. The procedures determining the bar lengths have
already been explained; the durations of the notes in each bar are determined by
the same '6-squares' (see Figure 3), subject to the 'sub-atomic' modifications
mentioned above. In schematic form, this yields the following results:
Basic Square Basic Dura~ons Slider modifica~ons

136452 1 6 18 9 11 1 | | 7 | |
fkarN 352614 6 11 1 18 1 9 1 1 1 4 1
rakfia 625341 18 1 11 6 9 1 8 1 2 2 2 1
irfaak 463125 9 18 6 1 1 11 3 9 2 1 1 3
kaia~ 514236 11 1 9 1 6 18 2 1 2 1 1 6
~akrf 241563 1 9 1 11 18 6 |174174 1 Q
(circled values are 'sub-atomic )
Figure 9
Comparing these tables with the score (Figure 10), one sees that the 'irrational'
values within individual bars arise from totalling all the 'non-sub-atomic'
durations. In the first and sixth bars this situation doesn't arise, since there is only
one 'real" duration (in the sixth bar, the r value is given a notional semiquaver
duration). But in the second bar, for instance, the sum of 1 + 1 + 1 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 9
placed within a ~ bar leads to a 9:6 ratio, and in the third bar, the sum of 16 units
within a ~ bar leads to the ratio 8:9.
r .... '.:,': '
i ' i ' '
Figure 10 Funk p. 1. Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishers Ltd.
Even with the sub-bar system discussed above, certain very long durations
occur. In terms of the clarinet, these pose no particular problem, firstly because the
instrument is quite capable of sustaining them, and secondly because they offer a
convenient pretext for the introduction of complex multiphonics, s In the percus-
sion part, however, potential dif~culties do arise, not least because most of the
instruments have a relatively short resonance period. So Dench elects to convert
m a n y of the longer 'durations" (or more pragmatically, intervals of entry) into
periodic sequences of 5 attacks. A typical instance occurs on p. 9 of the score, about
half way through the R section (see Figure 11). A more drastic version of this
subdivision process occurs during section I, where longish values are converted
into rapid periodic sequences (see Figure 12).
s Thesemultiphonicsare not, it should be emphasised, merely coloristic;in the composer's words,

they are "super- or sub-scribed to the melody note in a clear harmonic fashion".
100 R. Toop
(~,~u~i ~-
.... ...-, ~ ................ e - - 9........................... ',~fL
Figure 11 Funk p. 9 (last bar). Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishers Ltd.
:,~,!!
m~ 11.,,
9 v- ---"
l i Illllt 9 ~ ~ [ Illllllil~.-
,,;,lt~tll T- llIIIlll " II
':-i,E--.L I I ! " L L III11111111111 I
84 " L~ e-.F
L!JII!!!!!!!!!
, ,:~r
!
~-~ ~ ;T = ""~. . . . .
I
I
'
I
I
Figure 12 Funk p. 12 (1st bar, bottom line). Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishe~
Ltd.
Pitch Structure
Though the pitch structure too has its roots in the name 'Afrika Bambaataa', in
most respects its treatment is quite different to that of metre and rhythm: less
rigorously formal, but at the same time, much more obviously "tendential'.
Neeedless to say, this is a considered decision:
The thing is that rhythms can only have one kind of phenomenological
meaning: they can only be slices of time. They can be associated with
sub-atomic time (in the form of grace-notes), or they can be a part of
macro-time. But they have only those two options, whereas pitches can be
characterised in a number of ways - one is working with a much wider range
of classes, and one can effect a much greater interchange.
The other thing is this: for me, pitch does not function in terms of orders;
I don't hear pitch in terms of precedencies, or even in terms of particular
tensional relationships such as the tonal system has generated, leaving us
with its heavy residue. I don't think of pitches in those hierarchic terms: I
think of them as being like iron filings within a magnetic field.
The basis of Dench's pitch structure is a 'reference field' of 16 pitches, derived

from 'Afrika Bambaataa' by projecting each letter-number as an ascending interval
based on a quarter-tone scale:
.j ~a
-, ~-~ #~-
A~'F R I K A B A M B A A T A A
Letter-number: 1 6 18 9 ii 1 2 1 13 2 I 1 20 1 1 (cf Figure I)
S c a l e number 1 2 8 26 35 45 47 49 50 63 65 66 67 87 88 89
F i g u r e 13
These 89 quarter-tones are, for practical purposes, the full range of the
contra-alto clarinet (shown here at notated pitch). As indicated earlier, this range
only proved usable at relatively modest speeds; for 'sub-atomic" passages it was
necessary to remove the top fifth, and shrink the range to 75 quarter-tones:
102 K Toop
vi~m 14
The various processes by which this raw material is focussed, compressed,

expanded, inflected and interlocked, can only be touched upon in what follows.
The composer describes the pitch structure as:
like a rope, a whole lot of skeins that are inextricably tied together; at a
certain point one skein has dominance, and at different points others have
dominance, but they are none the less roped together all the way through.
But to do you have to have a tidal force which, if you like, is the "warp' of
the thing.
Apart from the distinction between 'sub-atomic" grace-notes and main notes, there
are different pitch systems for the small (A, B) medium (F, I, K, M) and large (R, T)
sections, and each of these systems is the outcome of more or less complex
interlocking and iterative ('looping') processes. Whereas the grace-note structures
tend to be evolved in a fairly continuous, organic manner (not least because the
appropriate speed of emission precludes too great a variety or range of pitches), the
'main notes' arise from idiosyncratic selections of tessitura and 'band width" which
are one essential factor in giving the piece an overall shape. But these "selections'
arise from an "interlocking' process which occupies a very personal 'middle
ground' somewhere between Ferneyhough and Xenakis.
As an initial example, let's consider the opening of the sixth "A' section (AFRIKA
BAMBAAT_AA), most of which is drawn from the grace-note pitch-layer. The
9pitches arise from the interlocking of two pitch-systems, in (initially) compatible
low-medium pitch ranges. These sequences are, in turn, derived from two of the
ten basic pitch transformation charts used in Funk. The first (partly reproduced in
Figure 15), chart 2, is based on the 89-quarter-tone range. The part of it that
concerns us here is constructed in such a way that the number of notes in each line
augments from 1 to 16, and the range from 1 to 89 quarter-tones, while the
difference between small, medium and large intervals are progressively increased,
in such a way that the "topological" ratios are exactly retained. The transpositions
of the 16 lines are such that the last note of each line exactly matches the
equivalent pitch number in the fully extended "Afrika Bambaataa" scale (which
also appears as the 16th line of the chart). The other chart (Chart 8) applies the
same process to the 75-quarter-tone reduction (see Figure 16).
"1" -
j "-w-,
el "r, I ~i ,
9 ~
"1"
.4- !., t
..t , ! ,. 1.
~a :: | "
-I t
3,
.L ~. .. '-
X " - ~. L- i,.
. . . . . ' T ~- "l
~ : " -" "-: l t

"- itl - t $,
.... ,. ~ I I
~5-.r ~ ,- ,
, A. I,. b. d,. -I- -'t- t__i-t-
I' . ! .
:~- ~ ,.. . . . .+.~_~
I ~'t l. L_ I.= "f..= 4. ~. ..L
: : :: : i % - 1 " ~" "' :
"4" ~ "t- __iq-

., ,I ,. . +.-,-+~-~
89 --'-- "" , " : ":0
II
i i J 1~ l "" .-- ,.
F i g u r e 15 No. 2 of 10 P i t c h bransfomaation Charts: 89 Q u a r t e r - t o n e s .

104 R. Toop
7-
7_ ~ ' 4 b
"9" ' u '~
-ro-
: ,r~ • ,.. : '. 2 '
-,i'
.t L_ ".- """ -'.: §

q. ll= ,~- I 1: I
i i i ll~e
i "#'- 9
- ._ .
J . . :. :_ i-. ..
":"
t
"~.
.li.
"
9 ~l~m
.i
I
, p. a. o ~_. I t .
1 U
, i, el. ~. •
"1" "l"
F i g u r e 16 N o . 8 o f 10 Pitch T r a n s f o r m a t i o n Charts: 75 Quarter-tones.

What Dench does in this instance is to interlock first the 2 x 9 notes of the
50-quarter-tone lines, then the 2 x 10 notes of the 63s, and the same for the 65s,
66s etc.. This means that the overall range of the grace-notes slowly expands. The
notes from the two systems (75 and 89) are largely compatible in range, though the
75s are a little lower, leading to a slight widening of the joint tessitura:
89s 75s Jointly
50
9 i-
63 ! .... i. i I -.
-0-
65 j. f
pa- ~@
66
etc. ..r
*- =
89 /
Fi~.~e 17
The ordering of the pitches from each "slider" line is determined, in the first
instance, by a 15 x 15 square derived from the complete 'Afrika Bambaataa" name,
with each recurrence of the same letter getting a higher number:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
10 8 9
11
12
13
14 15
i.e. 1 10 14 11 12 2 8 3 13 9 4 5 15 6 7
Figure 18
106 R. Toop
The resulting square is:
89 l~ 1.so..i~l.~r'l.gz ,5 ")_.t')l ~ 4- ~ J~(: t

~o ~- 5 ~l.~ ll 2. ~z § 3 1=)H- <~ 1~I1
_,14: e> . ~ ~ [.j~' s,~' (,, 1 jtl t- 2.. 3 .J~ 4-
9~ '5, ~ ~ 7-17_ 3115-6 4-1~-I~ lo 1 2.
i2 b~ Io 7- ~ 177"ff ld- $ 5 !5 1 If 7_ 3
z ill 1~ iz Ib 3 i9 ~ .1~ !o 5 6 1 7- 6
5 2. (,, 5"I" ~ 15 Io'5 .t. !!.17- 7-- 15 14
17_]1 17) 14'1 IO ~]-:15 11 (,, t 2- 8!9
I$ 7- II ~b 9 ~ 5 I~13 ~> I Z tz $4-
~ ~ 17) !o 1~:1 7- 9_. 1~- (b ;$ ~ 14 &

(, f~i~r i.2. § 13 8 ~ vt ~ Io :~ II ~z
Figure 19
Where only 9 notes are involved, nos. 10-15 are simply deleted; where there are
10 notes, nos. 11-15 are ignored, and .so forth. The initial results are:
eg/so
8 2. 3
- h
!
~J
|
I
.t
JIl.~
I
lira I I IF"
!, I
~ ~ !
"i 'ii +' I

t 8 3 5 q ~
* for no apparent reason, "Looping' process starts here
pitch 6 hasbeen omitted.
Figure 20
As the diagram above implies, only eleven pitches are allowed to run their
course before a secondary process intervenes - that of 'looping'. This, as discussed
elsewhere, is a means of stablising harmonic field on an unpredictable basis.
Pitches from the "basic field" outlined above are recycled on the basis of the
'Bambaataa' 9-square:
S A M B A A T A A
- ::-. ;:: I I - " 1 : . ~ - - = : ~; . . . . .
Figure 21
Taking the 2nd line of the above square as a starting point, the intial results in
the section under discussion are:
t.! "-. 5 I
!
Figure 22
The actual result in the score (interlocked with "real" durations drawing on a
different pitch field) can be seen in Figure 23.
108 K Toop
,~,. ~r
m i i! lR I tI n |~., .wv ;a-i i
= . I, I1.,.,t . . . . . I
~-" "G. I II~K. ~ .,,
,4IIIIIII : ? iiHiii-i [ifii

"--&~~. .,
i ............
.j I TT T T"
ii I ? !
16 I } ~ i
]~5c i~,.~ ALL
(~to~__~.
F i g u r e 23 Funk p. 39. Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishers Ltd.
It's worth noting that, although we are looking here at the very beginning of the
"sub-atomic' pitch field, the point at which it comes into play is barely three pages
away from the end of the score. This affords an opportunity to point out that,
while Stockhausen may be far from being Dench's favourite composer, there are
many aspects of the latter's work that, whether consciously or not, pick up lessons
from the German composer's work in the mid- and late fifties. The fact that the
many pitch-layers of Funk have their conceptual starting-points staggered
throughout the score, so that the "starting point' offered by the initial pages of the
score is actually the quasi-arbitrary fade-in of cyclic processes which are, in
varying degrees, in media res, particularly suggests the procedures of Stockhaus-
en's Zyklus.
In the case of the grace-note fields, the ranges chosen are such that, until the
second "senza misura" of the second part (A4, p. 30) no dramatic shift in register is
perceptible. For more than half of the piece, and again towards the end, the
grace-notes sit within a middle range which does indeed expand and contract, but
is not as sharply delineated as that of the main notes.
By way of contrast, the main notes for the F, I, K and M sections show very clear
registral tendencies. The main source of the pitches is the 'slider table" shown in
part below:
i||Uiiiiil
HOiNmMMBBGii
Niiiiiii|
iiJiiii i!
MBRmHiBRBBiH
Figure 24 Extractfrom slider Table.
Dench makes a 9-note 'filter sweep' through this material; for the initial pitch
sequences he selects:
Line 89 notes 6-14
87 4-12
66 2-10
65 1-9 (cf. Figure 24)
110 K Toop
This produces a sharp registral descent:
,, 9~ 87,~,, 66 65
H
II/ %
I| ' t ~ J
~t
F~,ere 25
Using the "Bambaataa' square (Figure 20), the notes of each 'sweep' are
reordered as follows:
6 1 8 7 2 3 ~ 4 5[1 5 3 2 6 7 4 8 9~8 3 1 9 4 5 2 6 7 etc.
Figure 26
and the descent is further delayed and blurred by recourse to the 'looping' process
described earlier:
Figure 27
The initial results are shown in Figure 28.

E"
a
!!~:
..
ii ! i
--F
o,P~ " ."
Figure 28 Funk pp. 2-3. Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishers Ltd.
112 K Toop
The two longest sections (R and T) use quite different strategies. Those involved
in R are too involved to consider here; those for T are, on the contrary, are the
simplest in the whole piece. Dench, in discussion, is inclined to relegate them to
the 'crude but effective' category. Crude or not, the winding, howling melodies
and glissandi in the clarinet's uppermost register have an extraordinary catharctic
effect. The starting point is the upper division of the '47' line from the first of the
pitch charts:
$.....-. -,..~
Figure 29
These notes are then reordered according to the seventh line of Figure 19 (8, 2,
6, 3, 4 . . . ) , with all numbers above 10 deleted, and the initial 8 sent to the end (so
that the sequence doesn't get too high too soon, and so that the opening gesture
will be ascending, not descending):
pitch order: 2 6 3 4 9 10 5 1 7 8
intervening notes:10 11 12 8 4 9 5 6 7
Figure 30
Then another sequence of numbers from 4-12 (the first line of Figure 18, (1, 10,
14, 1 1 . . . ) but with the 9 and 4 interchanged) determines the number of notes in
a non-systematically derived and 'twisted" scale linking the two notes. Figure 31
shows the beginning of this process, as well as a couple of instances of the notes
which are intermittently placed in the very opposite register, serving to intensify
the hysterical character of this passage:
r / I IW f.,~,c,~,,,.
eil',l I I ._.~-~- I I ! '
Fig~e 31 Funk pp. 31-32. Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishers Ltd.
Although, as the composer points out, the treatment of the clannet and the
percussion parts is essentially dissimilar, there are inevitable and deliberate points
of overlap:
The whole piece was conceived in a contrapuntal fashion, and one has to
bear in mind that even in 'explosions" the ear can distinguish between a
totally chaotic, amorphous distribution of percussion sounds, and one which
has been organised. And the only way of making it sound non-chaotic that
I can temperamentally engage with is melodically. So in a way, what is
happening in the percussion is an attempt to create an unpitched analogue
to the pitch material.
114 R. Toop
Occasionally it will happen that the clarinet and percussion are playing different
'gradients" of the same rhythmic cell, with the same melodic shape. A particularly
clear case is the following bar from the R-section (p. 9 of the score):
-I~---;-;~TTi---i~_--~~-~ ;----"~T- ~-[]

+~+~~++.... T T ~u ,,
I '+''
+. ,,+
. ~+. I, I 'I ~,1 i+ II
- ' ~.'----~--===~ "t
Figure 32 Funk p. 9 (bar 2). Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishers Ltd.
This, however, is an extreme instance. On the other hand, certain pitch

procedures such as "looping' can be used to regulate the order in which different
members of a particular percussion 'family' are used. Procedures of this kind are
especially fully developed in the two longest sections: R (tomtoms) and T
(cymbals--* tomtoms). Let's look at the latter case.
There are five cymbals. If one takes the 'Bambaataa' 9-square reproduced above
(Figure 21) extracting only the numbers 1-5 (i.e. the As), one gets the following
sequence:
12345/ 15324/31452/23415/24351/35412etc.
Using this sequence as basic material, Dench interlocks groups of three
'unlooped' cymbal "pitches' with looping sequences based on complete lines of the
'Bambaataa' 9-square:
12345/ 15324/ 31452/ 23415/ 2435~/ 35412

I I I I _ _ -
61 87239 45 15326 7489 831

This leads to the cymbal sequence:
1234515235153243141234515532432345 etc.
t.l ! ______
6 1 8 7 2 3 9
(it will be noted that two different kinds of looping are involved: one which
starts on successive numbers of the basic sequence, and another which loops back
to the beginning)
The initial results can be seen by referring back to the percussion part of
Figure 31, which also shows how, even at this early stage, counter-principles are
beginning to seep in. In the -1. bar (2nd attack), a tomtom stroke has been
interpolated, and in the next bar~(7th attack) a chinese cymbal and bass drum have
been substituted for cymbal 2. These "interference processes' augment throughout
the section.
One could many more such examples; but the basic points have now been
made. The most important point of all is that Chris Dench seems to have arrived,
in Funk, at the classic point where system and freedom are no longer at odds, and
where the system itself is sufficiently rich to allow for all kinds of spontaneous
decisions which, far from negating it, simply direct it down different paths. The
composer offers this analogy:
The Renaissance painter put in all his vanishing points. But that doesn't
mean that his human beings won't have arms and legs that project outside
such things. The point is that these factors simply give me a preview, a prior
architectural conception of the dynamics, the tides which operate through
the piece. Thus, when working on the detail, one can generate all kinds of
felicitous cross-references, anti-references and intemal behaviours that can
both enhance and contradict the main processes. Those main processes are
the subtext, and however the surface of the music tends to decorate them,
they're still there.

Beyond The 'Crisis of Material' - Chris Dench's "Funk"

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Beyond The 'Crisis of Material' - Chris Dench's "Funk"

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On: 26 July 2008

Contemporary Music Review

Online Publication Date: 01 January 1995

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ContemporaryMusic Review, 9 1995 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH

Beyond the 'Crisis of Material':

KEYWORDS Composition technique, cabbala.

An earlier study of Chris D e n c h ' s w o r k 1 dated from a period (around 1986) w h e n

Dench uses the terms 'musical material'

The importations, in pieces like Enonc~and Afterimages, were partly extra-musical,

didn't seem to me to be such a bad idea if perhaps it were handled in a way

Beyond the Crisis of Material 87

3 Chris Dench, The Heart'sAlgorithms (BerFm1989).

me that I have succeeded, because I've managed to make the naturalness of

I approach the duster of phenomena that constitute a 'piece of music' as if

it even has a metaphorical smile on its face which is the consequence of

the exercise of the constant redirection of the material, of a perpetual

It is this trajectory that is pursued in Funk.

Apropos Funk: an Introduction and Conversation

Beyond the Crisis of Material 89

CD: Afrika Bambaataa regards himself as a social leader, and is regarded as

CD- Look, m y music is evangelical! It is nothing else, in a sense.

RT: Evangelical on behalf of what?

CT: The Wittgenstein is a deliberate red herring on my part. It has nothing

RT: Like Magritte's "This is not a pipe"?

RT: So it's funk as 'flunk', t o o . . . What about the other meaning, of

CD: The idea of panic is always strong, because in a way I am a paranoid

6 MichelFoucault, This is not a pipe, Universityof California Press (Berkeley1982).

Beyond the Crisis of Material 91

5 tomtoms 2 brake blocks chinese cymbal

"'Something I always know w h e n I start a piece is the feasible time-space it

want to create a quarter-of-an hour monster for clarinet and percussion,

Length of individual sections

Beyond the Crisis of Material 93

At this stage, Dench makes a further quasi-analytical decision: he divides these

On the other hand, the location of 46 semiquavers within 6 seconds means

Figure 5 BasicAFRIKA 6-square

In each of the subsections of the first part - A-F-R-I-K-A 2 - there is a sequence

Beyond the Crisis of Material 95

Figure 7 Metrical s c h e m e for AFRIKA section.

Major divisions (cf. Fig.l) A (ffi6") F (-36") R (-108")

Figure 8 Dis~ibution of attacks per bar in AFRIKA section.

Beyond the Crisis of Material 97

K - - - tightening again - "ecstatically"

M - - - suddenly hushed! - suddenly much more vigorous: growing!

Basic Square Basic Dura~ons Slider modifica~ons

Beyond the Crisis of Material 99

r .... '.:,': '

i ' i ' '

Figure 10 Funk p. 1. Reproduced by permission of United Music Publishers Ltd.

s Thesemultiphonicsare not, it should be emphasised, merely coloristic;in the composer's words,

.... ...-, ~ ................ e - - 9........................... ',~fL

Beyond the Crisis of Material 101

The basis of Dench's pitch structure is a 'reference field' of 16 pitches, derived

The various processes by which this raw material is focussed, compressed,

Beyond the Crisis of Material 103

~ : " -" "-: l t

: : :: : i % - 1 " ~" "' :

"4" ~ "t- __iq-

F i g u r e 15 No. 2 of 10 P i t c h bransfomaation Charts: 89 Q u a r t e r - t o n e s .

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