Automatism and decisiveness in composition: this theme may seem too restricted, or at any rate exclusively related to recent techniques such as those to which the computer leads us. Although the computer, more than any other piece of equipment, reveals the urgent need to reflect on this question, it seems that it is not the computer that has created this problem for composers, but that for some time now the question has been raised of the relationship between determination and chance in the composer's intentions, and also in the means of realization he uses to bring these intentions to fruition in formulated works.
This dilemma between automatism and decision is only one extreme point in a network of more general relationships, applying as much to the genesis of the work as to its realization, which justifies the work as a crossroads between the chosen and the found, the sought and the accepted.
Much has been said about the significance of the artistic project in relation to chance or determination. Many declarations of intent have been made about the validity of starting points, intentions, materials and formal components. We have seen many experiments based on chance, unadulterated by any kind of arrangement, on intuition, on spontaneous reactions, on improvisation. We have also seen experiments based on complete determination, where the composer's will was limited to triggering processes, which themselves took on the task of composing, where all relationships were calculated, where formal aspects were merely the consequence of an evolution of processes. In both cases, it's a case of all or nothing: I rely on the almighty power of a determination that is beyond me, and that I don't seek to understand; I create from scratch an organism that will take over from my own will, and will therefore not be subject to the accidents that I may encounter and that may cause me to deviate from the objective truth of structural phenomena. In both cases, I am the medium of either irrational or rational forces, it being understood that apparent irrationality is part of a rationality that escapes us, and that literal rationality is the limited expression of a transcendent order that we are only able to grasp within these limits.
Is the work nothing more than a series of accidents, a series of choices which, in other circumstances, might have produced quite different results?
In the chaos of intentions that precede it, what is the decisive phenomenon that will crystallize a result? Is the composer's aim to reveal this chaos, to contain it, or to annihilate it? And in the latter case, can he achieve the complete elimination of chance? Or conversely, if he takes chance as his guide, can he reject absolutely all choices and decisions? Doesn't he use certain methods to capture chance and give the result the appearance of a work of art?
So many questions, so many - literally - implementations.
P. B.