Transdisciplinary Design

Human Protocol: John Zorn and Composing Emergence

Posted by Katie Edmonds on December 15, 2014

When discussing emergent systems we generally mean local behavior producing macro results. Scientists observe emergence in nature, and engineers program emergence in the lab, but emergent systems designed for people who actively want to follow protocol to create a macro outcome is a space occupied almost entirely by crowdsourcing engineers. Composer John Zorn also in that space, but his system is entirely human.

Steven Johnson describes emergence as “movement from low level rules to high level sophistication” powered by “masses of relatively stupid elements rather than a single intelligent executive branch” (Johnson, 18). This makes sense for ants in a colony because ants, as far as we know, don’t make judgements calls, do research, call a friend for advice, or act strategically. These are all human behaviors, ones which we don’t willingly forfeit. When we do follow protocol we try to negotiate with it and seek to advance our own agenda in a larger system.

Johnson insists that emergence requires simple components like computational binary, or ignorant neurons. This makes perfect sense, as the best systems have simple components and emergent systems by definition operate without any individual component possessing the capacity to know the entirety of the system. However, unlike computer code or neurons humans are aware that they are participating in a larger system and that their actions have an impact on the emergent outcome. My participation in a protocol will always be motivated by intent, need, hope, fear, assumption, or social norms. How might an artificially emergent system embrace the human knowledge that it is acting as a part of a larger system that it doesn’t understand? I hadn’t encountered a project that incorporated a qualitative or phenomenological exploration of emergence until I saw John Zorn and a carefully assembled group of musicians in the 30 year anniversary performance of his improvisational work Cobra.

Cobra is a musical composition comprised of cues rather than notes. A conductor “prompts” the musicians to contribute improvised pieces in spontaneously assembled solos, duos, trios or quartets, and execute transitions that stitch together all the permutations into one performance. Zorn cues dynamism or resolution, unity and asynchronicity with cards he holds up before the semicircle of musicians. The composition can be performed by any collection of instruments, as according to Zorn the selection of performers is the critical choice, not the instruments. As I watched the performance I found my attention drifting between the protocol called out by the cards and the emergent system that was the performed piece.

 

“They could play whatever language they had, but it was put into a certain kind of a  structural context. It was one that was fun to play. It was one where everybody had kind of an an equal say in controlling where the piece went, but yet at the same time it created a kind of a sound world that I had envisioned.”

 

Zorn’s compositions embrace the individuals capacity to act with intent. The pieces rely on each musician’s motivation to produce nuanced, experimental, unique contributions. The quality of the emergent outcome is determined by the judgement of the individual contribution. The capacity of each musician to thrive in such an environment is considered a skill that they would never develop playing in a top down system like a symphony or even a jazz ensemble riffing on the standards. But what about Zorn? Is he operating as the omniscient executive in the composition?

 

“I think in blocks. In changing blocks of sound. In that sense one possible block is a genre of music. Pop music, jazz music, classical music, blues music, hardcore music. They’re all blocks that can be ordered and reordered the way the twelve pitches in the chromatic scale can be ordered and reordered. And Cobra is a really great example because most of the changes happen on the downbeat and it’s really clear when you hear the blocks moving…What I was really fascinated with was finding a way to harness these people’s talents in a compositional framework without actually hindering what they did best which is improvising. Finding a way to have them work in a group that created a kind of a shape or of a kind of a sound that could be identified with what I was interested in which was creating block of sound, but at the same time which didn’t limit their imagination, which never told them what to do.”


As a prompter Zorn is executing a script, he is acting as a human computer. In accordance with the protocol he receives directions from the musicians then calls out the action on the down beat, making sure the group covers all the permutations. Like the musicians he is motivated to contribute in a manner that is nuanced, experimental and unique. Is his work the epitome of emergence? Certainly not. He could design the prompts to be delivered by the musicians. This approach might produce an endless formation and disassembly of performance groups. This would be more successful if the work was evaluated by its scale, but Cobra isn’t spectacular because it is large. Its success comes from a more nuanced place of unexpected patterns, the initiation and resolution of moments that have never existed before and will never exist again. The performance that results from each execution of Cobra could never be composed by placing notes on the page. Perhaps this is the difference between successful emergence and excellent emergence.

 

For more on emergence:

Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Click here to view the Cobra protocol.