The music that represents the "flatform" idea most vividly, and which has guided me in this direction of musical exploration, includes most of Babbitt's work, (especially the recent music), some Boulez (2nd & 3rd sonatas for example), some Ferneyhough (for example, the guitar pieces Kurze Schatten II), music of Robert Morris (who, in an interview on his web site, offers the following description of flatform:

A piece of music is like a public park or a garden where one puts a lot of energy into the design of the thing to make it interesting...there are fountains and hedges and there are gardeners who take care of the flowers and there are some wild parts and some places that are very civilized where food is served. You know, you work all of this out...but when a person goes into this space, he or she doesn't have to visit its parts in any particular order...the piece is waiting for the listener to explore it.)

(Incidentally, this might all seem to relate to Stockhausen's "moment form" ideas; if we simply examine his ideas, un-realized, this is true; however, I don't find any of these ideas particularly well instantiated in his music---despite his best efforts, ole' Stocky seems unable to avoid large-scale dramatic movement and/or sectionalization in his works---thus, many of his claims about the "moment-form" listening experience (for example, that we, the listeners may "tune-out/tune-in" when we please, and that this will not effect our perception of any large-scale dramatic movement, because there is none to percieve), are belied by his music.)

For all that I enjoy the micro-level richness of the forms of these works, this music also frustrates me. Any given moment in a work by a Ferneyhough, Babbitt, or Boulez I usually find to be elegant, exquisite, violent, expressive and/or interesting, often in some bizarre way. But the intense compression, the density, in time, of all of these exquisite, individuated moments tends to negate their individuality; as a listener, my concentration's ability---to account for each event's individual character as well as its relation to its [immediate] surroundings---is dulled quickly. In the best of situations, I am able to "zone out" for a while, and then "tune back in" at a later time, but only to catch a few more events, out of thousands, each of which deserves my full attention.

That this is a problem, is, of course, an old idea that's been discussed by many, from Xenakis (Formalized Music) to Brindle (in that most amusing British textbook, Serial Composition), to Lerdahl (Cognitive Constraints), in a variety of ways. These writers most often take the view that because flatform lacks an overall arch or any sense of everything being an integral part of an overall hierarchical formal design, it fails. My frustrations are somewhat different: I do not feel the need for an overall formal arch, or hierarchical structure; I like heterarchy and anarchy. What frustrates me about earlier flatforms is simply the fact that the high density of the events makes it impossible for me to give each event the perceptual attention it deserves, as an individuated human creation. In a certain way, the speed of the events in a Babbitt or [selected] Boulez work is more tailor-made for the kind of accretive, tension-building form that Xenakis, Brindle, or Lerdahl argue for, but it then "fails" to compose out this form. These writers have, for the most part, taken a rejectionary stance, regarding "flat form" as a dead-end of 20th-century compositional experimentation, and not worth pursuing compositionally any more. I have been tempted to make this rejection as well, at times. Yet, I feel that outright rejection is too simplistic a solution to the problems that this music presents---because, after all, this music also presents us with many musical treasures: vivid, individuated, sonic moments and their local relations--i.e., "injections" of auditory delight. Instead of rejection, I am drawn to thinking through alternative ways of both approaching this music as a listener, and presenting it as composer or hypothetical performer/presenter.

Through my experiences as a listener I tried various approaches to come to terms with this music. Naturally, due to the most of the writing on the music, one's first attempt to get to know it involves investigating the question of whether repeated listenings will eventually put one in touch with the underlying structure (i.e. 12-tone structure in most cases) of the work. I think this is possible for some works, but only if one "trains" ones-self to hear these things, which would require a score. I never look at the scores of these works. I want to come to terms with the music in a way that requires only that I listen to it, and draw conclusions from what I percieve. I am looking for aspects of music structure that come out through listening only---and these structural features don't present themselves on the surface (and, from my experiments as a composer, I can say that if they did, the music would be quite dull.)

Continuing with this brief history of my listening experiences: for a while, I thought perhaps that the idea behind this music was that it was accessible through memorization [I mean listener memorization, not performer memorization]: I don't mean memorization for the purposes of divining the musical structure (or the compositional grammar), but that through memorization, the listener could eventually follow and anticipate every gesture, harmonic affect, and so on, during the listening experience. I think "anticipation" is a major factor in what makes the "learning" (memorization) of music something that human beings find worthwhile. A kind of pleasurable "click" happens in the mind, a sort of release occurs, when we encounter something we have been anticipating.

With a 15-minute work whose musical surface is organized hierarchically on the large scale (such as, to pick an example at random, a movement of a Mahler symphony), most listeners can attain a more or less complete "anticipatory" experience (i.e. the whole work is gesturally "memorized") with relatively few repeated listenings. This is not very difficult, and can indeed result in some ecstatic listening experiences (at least, they've happened to me. . .) So, the theory might go, if a piece is 2,000 times more dense, and the same memorize/anticipation process happens, one might then have an experience 2,000 times more ecstatic; and(hopefully) one whose anticipatory "clicks" wouldn't "wear out" so quickly, as they do in the case of pop songs, (for example), that one listens to often.

Sadly, to memorize an entire 15-minute long Babbitt work, or all of the Kurze Schatten (Ferneyhough), is nearly impossible for a listening-only paradigm (that isn't completely draconian), without the aid of score. I have tried. Performers of this music (obviously), or those with access to the scores or other methods of achieving the redundancy necessary for the memorization process, are able to do it, but again, I was searching for a process that would be available to any willing listener, regardless of skills, who would put in the same amount of repeated listenings that, say, a typical pop-song is often given.

So this idea of trying to "know" or "master" the work was apparently not going to lead to a solution to the frustrations of flatmusic.

One day Jason Roth, a music humanities teacher and fellow composer at Columbia, told me that though the (mostly non-musician) kids in his class really loved Webern (he had played them the Op.5 Bagatelles for string quartet); they disliked Babbitt and Cage. From the point of view of these students, I'm sure these were very similar musical languages. I guessed that the issue was mainly length: with the Webern pieces, the mind hears a small set of gestures, non-tonal and non-pulsed, and therefore completely "random" from the point of view of the typical hum-student; but then, there is the space between the gestures, and then between the movements, time for the listener to ask him/herself, "Hmmm. Now what if that random stuff were actually music? How would I think of it as music?" They have time to make associations, however distant they may be, with tonality, with various sonic experiences they've had, with images that may come to mind, etc. In short, they have time to "get to know" and "learn" the musical gestures and their affects.

Eventually, I hit upon an idea: given a longish flatmusic work, I would pick out arbitrary an segment(s) of this music, of no more than a minute in length, loop that segment, and see what micro-listening experience I could get out of it. I would choose some time frame on the CD recording, for example 5:11-6:05, and listen to it 7 or 8 times in a row. asking myself that question, "hmmm . . what if this were music, how would it make sense?"

This may not seem like a particularly revelatory idea: after all, if I am a theorist preparing to write a paper on a given work, this kind of "focussed-in" listening would be essential. However, most people don't think of it as a "natural" way of listening to music; i.e. this kind of listening is reserved for "the experts" to pursue. With most music, this state of affairs (where "zoomed-in" listening is reserved for "experts only") is fine; from the experience of most listeners of listening to the whole work, enough is remembered about different sections of the work, that future listenings of the entire work will gradually fill in the details necessary to build towards a reasonably rich "anticipatory" experience mentioned above. With flatmusic, however, this memorization is far more difficult, as there is no hierarchical structure to automatically "fill in the details" necessary for the anticipatory experience, and thus the usual paradigm of repeated listenings to the whole work can be unsuccessful.

The result of my experiment with "zoomed-in listening" was revelatory: pieces that had seemed intolerably dull, or just too dense, suddenly began to open up to me. For me, an enjoyable listening experience, along with the sheer sensual joys of encountering musical objects consisting of varied timbral, harmonic, linear, rhythmic, or (most often) hybrids of these aspects, includes making a number of quite simple music-structural associations: (examples: "Oh yeah, that's the same note that appeared in the clarinet a second ago" or something more structural: "Hmmm. there seems to be a kind of pedal point through this whole section . . . then that "pedal" pitch moves up a whole step for the next 30 seconds. . ." (As usual, things that sound simplistic in verbal description are usually much more vivid in heard experience (hence the failure of minimalism in academia for decades), so I cannot do justice here to their value to me as musical experiences.) These associations and parsings of the surface overlap and interfere with one another: often over the course of several listenings, events or ways of relating events that I hadn't thought of before, suddenly surface; others, that had been quite vivid to me, seem to disappear. At any rate, the result of my "zoom" experiment was that these listening experiences became available for experiencing in the context of works in flatform---in previous experiences, attempting to listen to entire works, I quickly became too tired to experience anything in particular.

The effect on memory of these listening experiences was interesting: You might think that I was aiming at "breaking down the problem" in order to be able to "memorize" and eventually have the "anticipatory" experience I spoke of earlier. But, in fact, I would still forget the details of the explored moments soon (a few hours or a day) after hearing them . . . but I felt that once I had made some kind of contact with the music, I no longer needed to "memorize" it in any sense. In fact, I rather liked the idea that I would become intensely involved with a bit of music, and then forget it; and all that would linger on would be a vague memory, or emotional 'imprint' of the experience. This also helps surround the music with an aura of mystery, of something always waiting to be explored; which is a characteristic of many of my favorite pieces of music.

Thus, to speak in analogy, flatmusic works are like city-scapes, more or less "flat" from a distance, but teeming with detail when looked at closely: filled with "shops" one can visit, but the trick is, you have to stay in a given "shop" for a while. (People refer to Bruckner's works as cathedrals, but I think of his music more like Stonehenge: a few massive, primal stone blocks arranged in a formation: charming, often very expressive, but formally primal.)

It might be argued, "Why not take these beautiful moments and stick them in a nice 'satisfying' arch-form hierarchical situation? Then you get the best of both worlds: beautifully detailed local formations; and an overall form that's easily swallowable."

The most important answer to this question, is that a composer working in flatform wants not to allow one's work to be "reduceable" journalistically, so to speak. For example, not to have people be able to say, "well, there's the pizzicato section, then there's the slow part, then the music builds to a big climax, then there's the violin solo, and. . . .that's it. That's the piece." There are great, detailed, pieces that can be described this way: for example, Bartok's Music for Percussion, Strings, and Celesta is a masterfully done climaxform, with lots of detail, certainly; yet it is possible, even probable, that a listener, satisfied by the grand working-out of the climaxform, will find no compelling reason to look deeper into the details of the piece. I feel that there is something sad about this, about the fact that someone can make a tidy, "sound-bite" description of a piece, and leave their acquaintanceship with the music at that. Perhaps I am being too idealistic, but by making a flatform, my goal is that the only way that someone can approach the music, is by listening to the details. If they don't pursue the latter, they will get nothing out of the music.

As a parallel from the visual-art world, the catalogue of photographic reproductions of paintings by Jackson Pollock, from a recent retrospective of his work at MOMA, included, next to many of the reproductions of the paintings, "zoomed-in" reproductions of small parts of the paintings. I haven't seen this done with too many artists. But Pollock's work nearly demands it: one has to admit, that there's not much point in looking at the whole painting, it's a big mess, that's about all one can say from that distance: As with flatmusic, the only way to make real meaningful contact with the work is to examine details. The work, in a sense, is irreduceable.

Plus, a great amount of the interest/charm of the individuated moments (the "shops") comes from the very fact that they are not associated with a musical hierarchy, the fact that they appear almost randomly---to give them a "reason" for existence or instantiation at a given point, via a hierarchical structure, robs them of much of their inherent character.

Though composers such as Babbitt, "Chuckles," Martino, and so on followed this path rigorously, what they haughtily ignored was the issue of presentation---of placing the music in the best possible listening paradigm. (Visual artists have less of a problem---a museum setting at least does not utterly prevent one from "focussing" in on details---in music, the situation is "Listen to this lick . . . oh you misssed it . . . .well, too bad, time keeps'a'moving on . . .") I thought, if I want to explore this "flat music" paradigm as a composer, I ought to figure out what it's ultimate presentation format, the best "interface" 'twixt it and the listener, would be. Obviously, it would be something that would facilitate the kind "shop-visiting" listening-mode I describe above. In fact, today such a format exists readily: an interactive interface on computer, in this case implemented with MAX/MSP.