Radu Malfatti talks about somethings

...half way through this interview with Dan Warburton, February 2001


Moving on to your recent rediscovery of composition, could you give me your definitions of form, material and structure, which you referred to earlier? I think the distinction between form and structure is especially relevant.
I know that this is a tricky question and I'll try to start with an easy analogy (one I used once in a classroom trying to explain it to kids - which always is good for one's own understanding). Take a house: the form is the overall shape of the building - e.g. round, square, long, high and narrow etc. The material is clear - wood, bricks, concrete (nice word in this context) etc. The structure would be the shapes, patterns, design, layout of the different rooms and spaces and the their number, e.g. one big room, many small ones etc. It's only an analogy and analogies never really work, but it's a start. We could then accept the word "form" to refer to sonatas, symphonies, 12-bar blues, "long" pieces, "short" pieces etc. "Material" is a major scale, "in g-flat minor", or Lachenmann's "Materialzertrümmerung" (a kind of demolition, destruction of the old, well-known material), noises, scratching etc. "Structure" would then stand for the density, spaciness etc. I hope this sheds a little new light on the discussion.

So structure is a kind of function of event-density?
Very well expressed, thank you!


This would explain why certain "New Complexity" composers such as Spahlinger and Richard Barrett are both enthusiastic improvisors..
And quite lousy ones too! They only move along the old, well-trodden paths! I see the same idiomatics in improvised music: it must be "active", "energy-loaded" and God knows what to be interesting or "succsessful". This is why it doesn't really matter if one piece of music is improvised and another composed if they're both moving in the same direction, the one maybe willingly, the other under the pretext of doing something completely new, without realizing that the same modules are being used. For example, I know Evan Parker hates Ferneyhough on the grounds that he just can't see the point of writing music which is completely unplayable. But if you have a close look at Evan's own work, you realize that he is moving around in exactly the same category. His work also is "unplayable" - at least for others - and he seems to be as interested in virtuosity as good old Brian is. Neither of them can get rid of the old structures, the density, the mobilmachung and they both quite willingly follow the path of Beethoven, Boulez (Pierre j' vous laisse) and the rest. It seems to me that they are both tied up in the materialistic aspect of music - and they do it very well - but how about the structure? Nothing! We can listen to probably over 96% of the music which mercilessly surrounds us and it all has the same underlying structure: never-ending, on-and-on-going gabbiness. What exactly is the difference between MTV-music and most of the classical avant-garde? Of course they use different material, but in the final analysis they are both intensively talkative.