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15.2.05
christian wolff, cardew, other things
::from an interview w/ c.w.:
'On a more pragmatic level, many of these pieces that are indeterminate are not, in the conventional sense, difficult to play. That had a lot to do with the fact that I myself am not virtuoso by any stretch of the imagination, but on the other hand, I very much wanted to be playing. These pieces were originally done at a time when it was very difficult to get professional performances. We had almost no resources. To make music that was available for performance to a wide range of performers, not necessarily professionals, that was definitely a factor. It's a little paradoxical, because I was hanging out with people like David Tudor. It really pleased me to be able to make a music that on the one hand would be interesting for somebody like Tudor, who could do wonderful things with it, and at the same time, would also be available for people like myself, who were basically amateurs, as far as performing went.'
::from an essay on marxist musical practice, Music as Metaphor for Social Order and Process:
'Wolff, during the 1970s especially, pioneered the concept of pieces in which the process of rehearsal and performance becomes a model of social interaction, a way of revealing to the performers what kind of power struggles erupt in interactive situations, and how to avoid them. His early pieces such as For One, Two, or Three People (1964) had placed performers in the situation of reacting to each other according to rules, with some leeway. Wolff says that he was later made aware of the political implications of the "democratic interdependence" required by such pieces...
In 1975, I remember performing, as a student among many others, in Exercises at the June in Buffalo festival. Afterwards the performers engaged in a discussion to examine how the piece went. Those who had taken an aggressive leadership role during rehearsals and made decisions for the group declared that the process had indeed been a model of democracy and cooperation. Those of us who had been quieter and held back pointed out that the others had been rather dictatorial, and that we felt like we had been railroaded. The performance had been a model for the problems of a democratic cooperative, but not necessarily for the solutions. The other issue for such pieces, of course, is that in a sense they seem to be performed for the benefit of the performers, with little regard for what the audience will experience. In this way one could say they assume a non-European performance practice, such as Native American dances in which every member of a village participates either as musician or dancer.'
::cardew:
'a composer who hears sounds will try to find notation for sounds. one who has ideas will find one that expresses his ideas, leaving interpretation free, in confidence that his ideas have been accurately and concisely notated.'
::christopher hobbs' Voicepiece (see p.4), rad concept, rigid rules interacting with near-randomness
::syr 4...
essay by william winant on the genesis of sonic youth's "goodbye 20th century" project... page includes 3 graphic scores:
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pauline oliveros
::from Deep Listening™ Bridge To Collaboration
In 1970 I began a body of work called Sonic Meditation. Sonic Meditations are recipes for ways of listening and sounding and are scores transmitted orally without conventional musical notation. I found that I could involve all kinds of people in Sonic Meditations whether or not they had any musical training. What mattered was an interest in participation, the cultivation of listening strategies and willingness to explore sound. At the time I was teaching composition and experimental studies in the music department at the University of California at San Diego. My Sonic Meditations flew in the face of traditional harmony and counterpoint and also of the complex written scores of contemporary music.
::a Sonic Meditation:
Sounds From Childhood
Can you imagine a time in your child hood when you loved to make mouth noises?
Can you imagine freely making those sounds now?
In the next five or more minutes make as many of those sounds as you want
in spaces you hear and claim as your own.
::3 downloadable scores
otherminds.org
::Charles Amirkhanian, sound poet
::includes 10+2: 12 American Sound Text Pieces
::spoken word and music samples from meredith monk, pauline oliveros, christian wolff, don byron, many more
::streaming audio from omradio
7.2.05
zorn
::the game pieces, a review, with quotes from jz, like: "The content of the piece is improvised according to complex instructions. The rules establish structures without dictating outcomes, much as the rules of baseball determine the conduct of the game but not its final score."
::from Ugly Beauty:
John Zorn and the Politics of Postmodern Music by Kevin McNeilly:
"Zorn's music does something palpable to its listeners, or at least incites them to a form of action, of awakening; it activates the listener...
eventually it came back to using genre as musical notes and moving these blocks of genre around....
the well-worn, commercially-exploited genres remain intact. Zorn himself exploits the expectations of a repetition-hungry consumer culture, turning those expectations, so to speak, on their ears. Zorn's organization of noise consists not in the dismantling or disabling of genre by noise, but rather in the stream of cross-talk between noise and genre....
Zorn disrupts all forms of contemplation (especially the listener-passivity encouraged by electronic reproduction and anaesthetic stereo background), and calls instead for an active, deliberate, offensive engagement with the world, a praxis,...
when he composes for his "family" of players, he writes in such a way as not to limit the potentials of those players, while providing a structure within which they can work; the tension between noises--intentional and chaotic, parodic and expressive--which we have been examining in Zorn's music is thus reproduced on a compositional level, as Zorn seeks to balance improvisational freedom with the parameters of a notated structure, a balance discovered, for that matter, within structurality itself....
The "score" of _Cobra_ illustrates this push toward engagement. It consists of a series of hand signals, each of which corresponds to a type of interaction ranging from quickly-traded bursts of sound to aggressive competitions. Any one of the players may choose at any time to change the direction of the piece and to alter the type of interaction; Zorn's function as conductor is merely to relay that change to the rest of the players, through a hand signal, and to offer a downbeat. Players may also, individually or in groups, engage in "guerrilla tactics," for which there exists a whole new set of signals, by which they attempt to wrest control of the group from the conductor and to conduct their own series of interactions. The game itself is thus antagonistic and collaborative, at once reproducing the composer-conductor hierarchy of traditional "classical" music and subverting that hierarchy from within the "composition" itself. No two performances are the same, as the recent double-edition release of the piece indicates, but all performances exist within the same parameters, as collective communal works."
graphic scores
text-instruction score (with audio sample) for turntable from architect/musician janek schaefer
graphic score from some 2nd graders in england:
graphic scores in tribute to cage:
more kids' work: "journey around a supermarket", with audio
"Composed by Joanne Cannon, software by Stuart Favilla, this work for improviser/s and interactive computer algorithms takes a performer/s and the audience through a 17 year history of Joanne's leukemia. Players navigate a complex map of musical events which document personal experiences of the disease, desperate contingencies, treatment, and long lasting effects....
A performance of 'Speak' is constructed from three structural components. These include the graphic score, the sound experiences and the computer algorithms."
stockhausen's "kontakte":
potential graphic score, increasing the aleatory:
(Average literacy score of population aged 17 to 25 relative to the cross-section mean)
and how about this one, also from google image search for graphic score:
(An analysis of gaming consoles, old and new.)
1.2.05
google: "text score" music
algorithmic.net "provides a comprehensive resource in systems for algorithmic music composition, including links to research, software downloads, documentation, and audio (sound-file) examples. Systems that function as compositional aides and utility tools for composers are also included." (site of composer/sound designer Christopher Ariza)
text scores from composer gavin bryars
american gamelan institute: includes a streamable GONGCAST, plus some other recordings
"frog peak music (a composers' collective) is an artist-run organization devoted to publishing and producing experimental and unusual works, distributing artist-produced materials, and in general providing a home for its artists."
j. simon van der walt::Ritual Preparation of the Performance Space text score
the keyboard of eternal change (1951 - 1957)
"Earlier, having experienced audiences who laughed during his pieces which he thought to be sad, Cage came to distrust the idea that music was all about communication, and was distressed that he could not discover a clear reason to compose music; he even considered giving up. Then Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player, told him 'The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.'"
graphic scores (sort of small images) from earl brown (p.36), morton feldman (p.43), anestis logothetis (p.44); and a text score from christian wolff (p.45):
"Most commonly, text scores have been used to 'give a more or less clearly stated basis for ensemble improvisations.' . . . In cases where the notation, or a lack thereof, makes the music still more indeterminate,
the performer’s responsibilities increase exponentially."
stockhausen text score ("RIGHT DURATIONS") at this page about Thermoscore: A New-type Musical Score with Temperature Sensation, wow
Some composers associated with pieces which utilize performer indeterminacy are: Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Cornelius Cardew, Witold Lutoslawski. Some composers associated with graphic scoring are: Feldman, Martin Bartlett, Robin Mortimore. Some composers associated with text scores are: Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, Dick Higgins.
david toop on john zorn
Zorn has claimed that music is not about sound, not even about time, but at a fundamental level an instantaneous communication of thought. Much of his music is an audible realisation of actions set in motion.... [His performances shift] 'the focus from the performer's manipulations to the objects themselves ... the objects became for me like solid sounds, different shapes, textures, colors, histories, to be ordered in musical fashion.' .... Zorn's interest in structures based on linear assemblages of blocks....
To listen to two albums back to back - _Cynical Hysterie Hour_ and _Cobra:Tokyo Operation_ - is to plunge into a vortex in which simultaneous memory and precognition of all stimuli within the pleasure dome is permanently switched to stun power. The music fulfills his criteria of an immediate communication of thought, an insight into the idea-streaming of a person wholly alive to the chaotic marvels and horrors of 20th- and 21st-century culture.
One of his contributions to contemporary music is his search for new compositional means to organise this illuminated consciousness. ...gamepieces... methods for raising the potential of group improvisation to a vehicle for extreme diversity.
---David Toop, _Haunted Weather_
