Systems music

Systems music is a term which has been used to describe the work of composers who concern themselves primarily with sound continua which evolve gradually, often over very long periods of time (Sutherland 1994, 172). Historically, the American minimalists Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Philip Glass are considered the principal proponents of this compositional approach. Works by this group of composers are often characterized by features such as stasis or repetitiveness.

A number of English experimental composers have also developed systems based music particularly Michael Parsons, Howard Skempton, John White, and Michael Nyman (Sutherland 1994, 183). This form of systems music is more commonly referred to as "minimalism".

In the realm of computer music, "systems music" refers to fractal-based, computer-assisted composition, and in particular iterated function systems music, in which a function "is applied repeatedly, each time taking as argument its value at the previous application" (Gogins 1991, 40).

'Machine processes', developed by John White evidenced a systems approach. Machine processes typically had a repetitive structure generated by random processes (dart boards, random number tables, chess moves). A typical 'Machine piece' of this genre is White's Drinking and Hooting Machine (1968), in which each player performs by blowing over the top of a bottle of 'a favoured drink', then altering the tone of the bottle by taking sips, swigs, or gulps from the drink (or leaving it alone) from a table of numbers obtained through random processes.

A form of systems is the 'found system', preferred by Christopher Hobbs, in his work Aran (1971), in which a knitting pattern for an Aran sweater, with its different stitches, determines the pitches chosen and the instruments to play them, and in his recent series of pieces called Sudoku Music (2005-6), using 'super' or 'mega' sudoku puzzles having a hexadecimal (16 x 16) grid.

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