The Chord of Nature or Natural Randomness

Enacting, reinterpreting, and representing nature have been central to art since the concept of mimêsis was introduced in the works of Plato and Aristotle. In music, tonality is an organic relationship between notes, emerging from the “natural” perception of sound. Tonal music, in Western traditions and beyond, has more or less operated within this organic system, resulting in the edifice of tonal music over the centuries. Sound became music through this “natural” perception, and organic relations justified musical constructs and pieces. This progress was indeed parallel to developments in the principles of causality, logic, and organization, and supported by the idea that there is nothing without a reason. 

Modern science, however, explores natural systems where randomness, disorder, and disorganization play parts. Modern developments in probability theory have formulated accounts to examine the nature of randomness, which are necessary for understanding the world. Probability remediates the duality between organization and disorganization, order and disorder, and causality and randomness.

In Western tonal music, the evolution of tonality to atonality mirrors the modern developments. The determinism of causality is embodied in tonal organization, producing the authoritative force of tonic as the centralization of tonality. Atonality, and in particular, serialism, was an effort to liberate from the authoritative force of tonality among other aesthetic inspirations. Paradoxically, this approach, however, ultimately led to the determinism of a strict set of serialist rules.

Iannis Xenakis offered stochastic music influenced by the randomness of complex systems. These complex systems are found in physical, natural, and social systems. He was influenced by natural events, such as tornadoes, and social complex systems, including a battlefield or a crowd demonstration on the streets. These are complex systems that emerge from the agency of multiple components involved. Xenakis applied probability calculations and group theory to construct musical entities that enact the disorder and disorganization of nature within a logical framework. Furthermore, he sought to examine the ever-present duality between continuity and discreteness by exploring strategies to capture the continuity of sound and compose pieces that operate on a continuous sonic basis. 

The tendency toward nature shapes both poles of the spectrum: Tonality leans toward the nature of the body, and atonality and stochastics operate on mathematical relations. Andrew Mead suggests that the “Chord of Nature” in the Schenkerian framework, as one of the central paradigms of tonal music, is indeed the chord of nature of our body and its physiological foundations. Whereas stochasticism views nature as a higher entity rooted in the mathematical foundations of the world. Ultimately, the formulation of “nature” within this spectrum, from nature as a bodily notion to nature as complex randomness, remains unclear, as a piece of music must alienate sonic constructs from the natural continuity of sound to discrete musical constructs. The question, then, is which pole of the spectrum is more “natural,” and which more organic.

More readings on Xenakis’s stochasticism: Xenakis, Iannis. Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition. Rev. ed. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992.

Embodied approach to the chord of nature: Mead, Andrew. “Bodily Hearing: Physiological Metaphors and Musical Understanding.” Journal of Music Theory 43, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1–19.