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Example 1

At the end of the 1970s, as an important step to wards his overall musical system, Braxton tried to exceed
the border of a single composition by combining various works in order to broaden the creative potential
of his music. As a new way of performing practice, he started to insert various compositions into one
continuo us set in his quartet performances. The compositions the musicians were going to use were
selected by the composer according to their potential of musical development, thus improvising the
transitions between them. This way of creating a kind of suites was called coordinate music (5).

In the 1980s, as an extension of this approach, Braxton developed the collage music : In the collage
music, the members of his ensemble (6) also played music of separate compositions, but all at the same
time. Braxton compared his idea of the collage music with a walk down the hall of a music school where
everybody would be playing something different in each room (7).

Also in the 1980s, the pulse track music, another example of Braxton's innovations, became important for
the development of Ghost Trance Music as well. Within this concept, Braxton noted rhythmic phrases for
the instruments of the rhythm section, allowing the soloists to play pitch-based compositions or
improvisations at the same time. Thus, a new basis for the interplay between soloist and rhythm section
was established (8).

All these steps and developments led to Braxton's integral musical system, which is rooted in four easily
stated principles. These postulates are valid for all of his compositions and were published in his
Composition Notes in 1988 (9) :

1.
All compositions in my music system connect together.
2.
II. All instrumental parts in my group of musics are autonomous.
3.
All tempos in this music state are relative (negotiable).
4.
IV. All volume dynamic s in this sound world are relative.

Summing up these four postulates, one could say that in Braxton's musical system any note of any
composition could be played on any instrument, at any tempo, at any volume dynamics, and in
combination with any piece of any other composition.

After having produced a huge corpus of quartet music, in the early 1990s, Braxton was again looking for
a kind of extension of his musical system : He wanted a greater integration of his compositions as well as
more space for the individual expression of the musicians (10). Because of these further extensions,
Braxton also needed a kind of connection in between his work. He compared that with traveling from one
town to another one, for instance from Composition No. 47 to Composition No. 96. For that, he was
looking for a system of tracks, like a giant choo-choo train system, which would show the combinations
in between the towns, in between his compositions (11).

Another aspect was that Braxton also wanted to extend the ritual and ceremonial side of his music and so
to emphasize the intuitive part of his music. He explained that his hope was to create a holistic music that