To accompany this listening list, I’ve assembled a playlist set of examples—works that reflect the ideas outlined here, including duration, open form, and the treatment of sound as material.

→ Listening Playlist (YouTube)

Duration and Attention

Some music builds gradually, adding one thing to the next – an accumulation of focused events – like a story or narrative. Other music simply unfolds in the moment, more as an atmosphere or sound world. Here, time isn’t just the background—it’s part of how the music works.

The experience is less about progression than about entering a state of listening, where small changes carry weight and time is felt as continuity rather than segmentation.

Éliane Radigue

Trilogie de la Mort
L’Île Re-Sonante
Adnos I–III

Radigue’s work moves with extraordinary patience. Sound evolves gradually, often imperceptibly, and yet the sense of form is unmistakable. The music asks for a different kind of attention—one that allows structure to emerge over time rather than be immediately grasped.

Related writing:
Éliane Radigue and the Radical Power of Slowness
Éliane Radigue: The New York Synthesis

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Morton Feldman

For Philip Guston
Why Patterns?
Triadic Memories

Feldman’s late works extend duration in a different way. Repetition, slight variation, and delicate shifts in sonority create a field in which memory and perception begin to blur. The music resists narrative, but it is never static.

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John Cage

Four4
One
one8

In Cage’s late works, sound is placed with great care and restraint. The spaces between events are as significant as the sounds themselves. Form arises through coexistence rather than development.

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Open Form and Indeterminacy

In these works, the score does not fully determine the result. Instead, it proposes a structure—a set of relationships, conditions, or possibilities—that must be realized in performance.

The performer does not simply execute the piece, but participates in bringing it into being. Each realization reveals a different aspect of the work.

Earle Brown

Available Forms
Four Systems
December 1952
November 1952

Brown’s graphic scores replace fixed notation with visual fields. Time, gesture, and density are suggested rather than prescribed. The act of reading becomes interpretive, and the resulting music reflects decisions made in real time. Available Forms is the first large-scale open-form work in which the conductor shapes the unfolding structure in real time.

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John Cage

Atlas Eclipticalis
Variations IV
Cartridge Music

Cage’s open-form works expand the idea of independence between performers. Events coexist without hierarchical coordination, creating textures that are both unpredictable and structurally coherent.

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Christian Wolff

For Prepared Piano
Tilbury 1
Play (Text piece)

Wolff’s music often operates through cues, interactions, and shared responsibility among performers. The structure emerges through listening and response, rather than through fixed alignment.

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Sound as Material

Here, sound is approached less as a vehicle for melody or harmony and more as a physical phenomenon—something to be shaped, filtered, sustained, or allowed to interact with itself.

The focus shifts toward timbre, resonance, density, and the behavior of sound in space.

Tod Dockstader

Aerial !-3
Apocalypse
Eight Electronic Pieces

Dockstader’s work explores the expressive potential of electronically generated and transformed sound. Texture becomes form, and contrast emerges through shifts in density and energy.

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David Lee Myers (Arcane Device)

Lathe
Terra Incognita
Phosphene Atoll

In Myers’s feedback systems, sound is not entirely controlled but set into motion. The music evolves through interaction, producing structures that are at once organic and unstable.

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Karlheinz Stockhausen

Kontakte
Gesang der Jünglinge
Hymnen

Stockhausen’s electronic works articulate space, timbre, and transformation with precision. Sound is treated as a compositional material with its own internal logic.

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Line, Gesture, and Space

Not all structures are large-scale. In some music, a single line or gesture carries the weight of form. Phrasing, timing, and articulation become the primary means of shaping musical thought.

This way of thinking has informed my own work at the piano, where a line can suggest an entire architecture.

Geri Allen

Lonely Woman
Segment
Round Midnight

Allen’s playing combines clarity of line with openness of form. Gesture and space are balanced with a strong sense of direction.

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Andrew Hill

Timelines
But Not Farewell
Blue Black

Hill’s music often moves between structure and freedom, with lines that are both angular and lyrical. Form is implied rather than fixed.

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Thelonious Monk

Well, You Needn’t
Jackie-ing
Bemsha Swing
Round Midnight

Monk’s use of space, timing, and articulation gives each gesture structural significance. The music is economical, but never sparse.

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Ornette Coleman

Tomorrow Is the Question!
When Will The Blues Leave
Space Church (Continuous Services)
Sound Museum: Three Women

Coleman’s work redefines the relationship between line and harmony. Structure emerges through interaction rather than predetermined progression.

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A Continuing Thread

This list is not meant to be complete, nor does it define a fixed aesthetic.

It reflects a set of ongoing concerns: proportion, pacing, openness, timbre, and the possibility that structure can emerge gradually through attention and interaction.

Some of these works connect directly to recordings released on Simple Harmonic Motion. Others belong to the background of listening and thought from which that work emerges.

The list will continue to evolve.

John Bickerton
Founder, Simple Harmonic Motion