I have just returned from a week of being “off the grid” … on an 80-acre island in Maine.

My first summer vacation was to the sea, and I wrote briefly about the power of the big water – its infiniteness, its desolate surface while teeming with life under the waves, its capacity to be calm or wild, deadly or life-giving.

This second vacation was on the ocean, but unlike the flat beaches of North Carolina, the rocky, cold Maine seaside is more of a setting for majestic mountains than for surfing and sunning. A visit to the mountains is equally refreshing, but of a completely different nature. Raising your head to the mountains makes you feel tall and strong. The cooler air is invigorating, not drowsy. The harsh angles and sharp peaks speak a different language than the tips of waves. And while mountains are more finite than the sea (you can see where they start and stop), they are unchanging.

So, how do these differences play out in music? There’s this romantic version; and of course the most famous scary mountain of all. Walter Piston‘s setting is majestic, angular, and specifically about the New England mountains.

If you don’t hang around geeky musical circles, it’s unlikely that you’ll know the name Walter Piston, but you probably know his most famous students Leonard Bernstein and Leroy Anderson. Piston wrote his orchestral suite Three New England Sketches in 1959. The movements are titled Seaside, Summer Evening, and Mountains. Piston claims there is no specific narrative in the suite, and that he chose the movement titles arbitrarily. Even so, he writes this little story about the first performance of the sketches:

… a man came up to me, following the premiere, and said, “I hope you don’t mind my saying that I smelled clams during the first movement.” I said, “No, that is quite all right. They are your clams.” Each individual is free to interpret as he wishes.

I am greatly looking forward to smelling clams by tomorrow evening – I’m off to New England for some much needed R & R.

Mention the name John Cage, and you’ll get a smirk out of every former music appreciation student.

“John Cage? Oh yeah, I like his music. I especially like his 4’33”, heh heh.”

Even if Cage’s music isn’t exactly the kind of stuff you turn on to relax at the end of a difficult day, he does make you think. Another of his famous philosophy-based compositions is “Music of Changes“. There is an ancient Chinese divination book, the I Ching, in which you toss three coins six times to determine your fortune. (you can use the I Ching online!) Cage took this idea and translated it into a compositional device. So instead of thinking, “I think this piece needs a quarter-note G here,” Cage used the I Ching to tell him what notes to put where – in a manner of speaking, removing the composer from the compositional process, and leaving every choice to a coin toss.

This idea of reducing the control of the composer is known as Indeterminacy, and was a reaction to a style called Serialism, in which the composer carefully organized everything with inflexible mathematical structures. The irony is that both the random Indeterminate music and the ultra-organized Serialist music both sounded the same – inhuman, confusing, and difficult.

So, what happens when a composer says “Let It Go!” and writes music based on chance alone? Listen: