Duration as compositional element

When describing the music of Eric Satie, John Cage posited that the most fundamental component of music was duration. While traditional composition was built on melody, harmony, and tempo, Satie began by charting the relative lengths of his musical parts. This prioritized the rest (silence) ahead of the note (sound), in other words, you can have time without melody, but you can’t have melody without time. It’s all about how long it lasts.

Do all good things come to an end?

Chanting is about as close as you can get to transcend these components: it is a repetitive cycle, a ritualized form of counting. While chanting can be about a contemplative internalized space (meditation), counting can also be about an articulation of a moment immediately prior to something (think the beginning of every Ramones song), like just before sex, a moment of pure potential. This is my favourite state, although I have a feeling that part of my attraction is its fleeting quality, a linear inevitability that must move forward, or at least cycle, tempus fugit. Anticipation and release.

How long will this last?

The problem with The Interior of a Minute is that it implies that it will follow a linear directive (count up if your starting a song, count down if your launching a rocket ship), but then it sabotages this through subtle edited interventions. Disembodied heads float upright on monitors near the ceiling, some are discernibly counting up or down, others may be praying in a different language, each producing its own eccentric rhythm and harmony. In theory this might produce a state of sublime suspension, but the reality feels closer to a creeping low-grade anxiety. This perpetual “action” has a stifling economy that becomes increasingly claustrophobic; I have always associated meditation with peace and harmony, not with the collective purgatory of this chorus. Further unsettling, the talking heads that make up this ensemble have a physiological distortion, all puffy and swollen from being hung upside down. The reverse effects of gravity (not unlike the time reversal cosmetic surgery attempts) look unnatural and disturbing.

We’re all in this together

I don’t really believe in a universal experience, but I find some comfort in the different ways that we occupy and prioritize our time. Abstract and conceptual preoccupations (like counting to an arbitrarily agreed upon point of time) are the ways humans counterbalance the overwhelmingly physical nature of our reality. We all have our own beautiful way of counting to sixty.

Essay by Daniel Bowden