Process music

The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously.

Elliott Carter, for example, used the word "process" to describe the complex compositional shapes he began using around 1944,[3][4] with works like the Piano Sonata and First String Quartet, and continued to use throughout his life.

[11] These works include Plus-Minus (1963), Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen, and Spiral (both 1968), and led to the verbally described processes of the intuitive music compositions in the cycles Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Für kommende Zeiten (1968–70).

Reich himself points to John Cage as an example of a composer who used compositional processes that could not be heard when the piece was performed.

[2] The postminimalist David Lang is another composer who does not want people to hear the process he uses to build a piece of music.

For example, in Karel Goeyvaerts's Sonata for Two Pianos, "registral process created a form that depended neither on conventional models nor ... on the composer's taste and judgment.

[17] Galen H. Brown acknowledges Nyman's five categories and proposes adding a sixth: mathematical process, which includes the manipulation of materials by means of permutation, addition, subtraction, multiplication, changes of rate, and so on.