Since 2005, I've had Masashi Hamauzu's album, "Piano Pieces 'SF2' Rhapsody on a Theme of SaGa Frontier 2" (let's shorten it to "SF2"), playing during quiet times, or times that need to be imbued with quietness -- like last night, while working on charcoal drawings in my studio. "SF2" is a collaborative album, with multiple arrangers and performers, almost all of them classical performers. "Rhapsody on a Theme of SaGa Frontier 2" makes reference to the album's last six songs that switch from the prior solo piano emphasis to an ensemble set-up (piano, strings, horns, etc). Even though this is advertised as the album's jewel, the solo piano pieces are my preferred feature. Over time, with more work under his belt, Hamauzu has come to be defined by the piano and violin, rather than just the piano. It may be an issue of immovable taste that this blend has rarely worked out for me; an issue of formality; or an issue of what sort of imaginative state the duo affects upon my emotions (e.g., a certain Baroque-era piece might sound limited to me because of what social/cultural associations I connect to that era, or my associations to what I perceive as others's associations); etc. There's something outside of my ability to express about such a brand of sweetness in these pieces' handling of the violin that prevents access to deeper, impassioned emotional responses
Listening helps, so here are a few piano-only "SF2" tracks. Of course, I recommend the rest.
"+4" 2
"+4" 3
"α" 2
"β" 2
"γ" 1
If you've ever heard the tracks (from the 1999 PlayStation game, SaGa Frontier 2) on which these recordings are based, the impulse might be to call "SF2"'s versions verbatim-faithful, and thus unambitious. The primary changes were putting them on a real piano's sound, modifying tempos, and reorganizing originally ensemble tracks for the piano. In other words, this is not an album full of complex dissections of antecedent innards. I think, though, that if you're willing to see them as a baring of the original objects -- that is, how the game's songs might've first been formulated by Hamauzu, prior to translating them over to the respective soundfont --, they can become much more interesting, expressive, and legitimate. At the very least, just on the level of comparative instrumental quality, "SF2" makes its soundtrack parallels pretty much irrelevant. SaGa Frontier 2's OST is done through emulative instruments, and the emulation is average to mediocre. For instance, sustained chords on strings sound flat, since there's no dynamism after a given chord has been hit; there is simply a straight extension of that initial state. Just two years later, Hamauzu would deliver the exact opposite, with lush, mature contributions to the Final Fantasy X OST that put Uematsu's pieces -- dated sounds and mundane musicality (likely due to creative fatigue) -- to shame.
One of my favorite things about "SF2"'s piano pieces is their pervading sparseness, large breathing spaces, and measured respect paid to Hamauzu's harmonic craft. "'+4' 2", for example, has pedal work and tempo adjustments to grant it a fragrant sumptuousness that's as much about the compositional fact and registering of the chords as it is about their resonant intermingling -- the sweet, faint dissonance of abutting tonic transitions. And "'4' +3", for another example, seems to have been stripped down to an absolute form that contemplates itself; the listening experience becomes about following the fading trails of the very individualized chords. It's possible that this sparseness could lead to a judgment of "lacking ambition" by some listeners. A little less than three years after "SF2", Hamauzu released "Piano Collections Final Fantasy X", which proved beyond a doubt that Hamauzu had, and has, the talent to reform his pieces to a degree that imparts a history of substantial creative reimagining ("Decisive Battle", off that album, is the definition of a virtuoso piano piece). This, coupled with the short span of time between "SF2" and "Piano Collections" -- i.e., Hamauzu did not become a brilliant arranger after only three years --, makes it apparent that "SF2" is a product of conscious choice. Hamauzu, after all, had a hand in its arrangements, and presumably set in place a standard, with contextual liberties, for the other arrangers. Under this lens, the question becomes one not of absent or present intent, but of how we are to react to such an intent.
"Complex dissections," as a thing that I've claimed "SF2"'s music is not, raises the topic of what I or anyone else means by complexity when it comes to music. For instance, to me, "complexity" has immediate implications that seem to be derived from the word's meaning in natural science, where it takes on the characteristics of density, intricacy, and productive success (that is, the achievement of a consistent and coherent goal (chaos can be complex, but complexity is not chaos)). Visually, "musical complexity" translates to sheet music with many notes and rhythmic devices which, when put into the context of performance, make a high demand of the performer. Therefore, J. S. Bach's music becomes an easy, popular example for complexity, partly for cultural atmosphere (the thing that makes so many people believe that the Mona Lisa is the greatest painting ever painted), and partly for our own associations that we spread thin over various departments for casual, communicative convenience. The problem that I see with this definitional tendency -- with its implications, anyway -- is that it suggests that musical complexity is an informational state unto itself. This produces the question of why musical complexity could then ever matter experientially, since music is a human creation made for other humans. And if musical complexity does matter, what is its connection to quality, and is this connection consistent enough to be developed into a standard?
This is not to suggest that musical theorists and composers have and still are working under fallacious assumptions of complexity; just that, based on my experiences, many of us seem to have a curiously irrelevant or inapplicable definition of musical complexity. I should say that I have no conclusive answers for myself right now; or, what answers I do have tend to grind against one another in endurable cognitive dissonance. For example, although I lack a coherent definition for musical complexity, I would still say that I value musical complexity as a general standard. What does this mean, then, when I'm impressed by "'4' +3" but am hesitant to categorize it as complex? One possibility is that it does fit outside of my definition of complexity, and that I'm making an exception based on yet-undefined factors. Another possibility is that it is indeed within my definition of complexity, and that its technical make-up is an unusual kind of complexity.
Some of these questions may seem ridiculous when one can ask, "Is there, in fact, any reasonable doubt as to whether this or this has a higher degree of complexity?" You or I might guess that most would say that the Mathias piece is more complex, and say that that shared ground helps in the search for meaning. So there may be more certainty in the concept when the content is stratified in a relatively traditional way (Hamauzu's track is shorter, has a higher rate of repetition, small thematic development, is easier to play, has more distinguishable and predictable harmonies, etc). But what happens when we contrast Mathias' sonata against, say, Debussy's "La plus que lente", or, better yet, Liszt's "Piano Sonata in B minor"? As complexity -- what we think of complexity -- gets more relationally equalized, it becomes harder to cement. Of course, the prior examples depend on my definitional presumptions, and I've yet to clarify those, giving us an analytic paradox; but maybe that can be ignored for the sake of expedience. What makes all of this the most difficult to nail down, it seems, is that music, like all art, is a subjective phenomenon -- it comes out of, and is made explicable by, consciousness; yet, unlike other art, it is non-denotative. Although there may be an average consensus between humans on what sorts of sounds and tones elicit certain emotional responses (perhaps anticipated by the phonetic qualities of language), these emotional responses can be the totality of meaning itself; and this meaning is bound to the ineffability of non-semantic sound.
One avenue of thought all this can lead to is that the start point for assessing musical complexity might not be the music -- rather, it might be subjective reactions to the music. Is this avenue rife with problems of its own? Do we measure these reactions in the scientific arena of monitored brain activity? Do we measure it by a person's ability to speak on or write about their relationship to a song? Do we aggregate results into a generalization, or do we take it case by case and make the definition hyper-subjective?
Stuff to mull over.
