The Way Music Looks

Art is a network of influences, reactions, meanings, misunderstandings, experiments, best-guesses, thievery, pretension, and desperation. In the end the audience will receive what they receive despite the maker’s best intentions; the math doesn’t always work out. The restoration of a painting – Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by the MOMA, for instance – reveals the subtleties of human touch evident in the original painter’s brushstroke. The painting is now even more Picasso, we see the art of Picasso’s true hand in this painting for the first time in decades.

In music, the score is art and the sound is art: Cardew’s Treatise, Bussotti’s Le Passion selon Sade (see score excerpt below), Crumb’s Makrokosmos, among others. It is representation of the reality of the creative (or created) object and it is a reality itself.

George Crumb: “I feel that all good music looks beautiful on the page.”

Notation is sometimes poetic and dramatic. The poetry and drama assists the performer’s eye and mind with understanding the music. Notational complexes and identities interact visually. And of course the sounds do the same.

The act of composing music can be a performance. An improvisation is a performed composition, or music composed while performing. But the act of composing music in solitude – music that will be interpreted by other musicians later – is also a performance. Albeit one with an absent and unknown audience, or an audience yet to come. The image on the page is a representation of musical ideas and is a result of a creative act.

Michael Finnissy: “The purpose of notation is to provoke sound.”

Both the type and amount of provocation present in the notation lie somewhere on a spectrum: the notation doesn’t always tell everything, nor does it always tell anything in a conventional sense. Notation is flexible. All notation is ultimately merely suggestive. That is to say that it guides the performer toward certain musical ideas. However, in some cases it may not actually or necessarily prescribe the particular sounds to be made. In many graphic or open scores this flexibility of notation (and implied trust in the performer) is overt. Some performers are better at learning to execute difficult passages exactly as written, other performers grasp concepts, shapes, feel, etc., and excel at partially improvising the music from the score.

Cornelius Cardew: “The sound should be a picture of the score, not vice versa.”

The score is a document that describes how to make music and it is also a piece of art in and of itself. This is mostly but not exclusively so when the final published score is the composer’s own drawing. It is especially so when the drawing extends or distorts conventional notation, or when it is a notation of unique design.

The way that music looks on the page is a product of its time and its sound. The sound of course is a product of the way the music looks on the page. Extant sheets of music from the Medieval and Renaissance periods look vastly different from music of later periods before the widespread use of mechanical printing methods. This is true not only because the notational systems differ, but also because the handwriting styles and writing materials differ.

Bussotti: