The Marrow Of The Device

concise, unequivocal

2009-02-12T08:42:00.000-08:00

a cubist perspective of the history of jazz drumming subject to variation by physical analogues to the techniques modern electronic musics

The Way Music Looks

2009-02-05T10:18:00.000-08:00

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:

The Beginning Of Weight

2009-01-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

And a much earlier take on the idea from the last post – "harmonizing" alien musical/graphic elements...

This trio is in three very short movements with a sort of programmatic element that is actually focused on my own and the perfomers’ reactions to a few instances of superimposed notation - the performers’ role is a dramatic one, whereas mine is behind the scenes trying to “harmonize” these jumbles of music.

This is the one of the first pieces I used that sort of notation in and it is based on music from my solo piano piece Wilderness and Self-Sufficiency (Book takes the idea further but is not based on Wilderness). In The Beginning of Weight the pianist is asked to interpret this superimposed notation in relation to the meter, but is not instructed to perform the pitch material in any particular way. My hope is that different pianists will have different reactions to the illegibility.

Movses Pogosian (vln), Jean Kopperud (bass clar), Jacob Greenberg (pno). This is a recording of an informal reading, but I still think they played the hell out of the piece! MP3 and JPGs of the score below...

And away we go

2009-01-08T19:01:00.000-08:00

Been deliberating about starting a blog. Finally decided to. It is mostly a repository for my compositions and recordings on the web. Here it is:

One of my new year's resolutions was to get back to composing notated scores. I've been doing a lot of computer composition (Max/MSP, Logic Pro) for the last couple years and only a little bit of composing on paper. One of the main projects that involves both computer and paper compositions is Microkingdom – myself and Marc Miller, usually John Dierker and sometimes other people. We record improvisations and some of my compositions and I sample and edit them into something that sometimes gets referred to as unjazz or spazzjazz or nojazz. I think of it as pop music, but really is most definitely not. More on that group later.

I've really been interested in regenerative composition. The Microkingdom music is one type of regeneration and my paper scores tend toward another type. So, I finally composed and actually finished a new score for the first time in a while.

The Current Bones Cannot Accommodate for violin, cello, piano and percussion. I extracted fragments from Book and recontextualized them. I like to think of it as forced harmonization of alien events. A formal limit is the page. I like to compose on letter size paper because it challenges my conception of musical time. In this piece there are very short sections only as long as a system or maybe a page, but there are also methods of thwarting the imposed or imagined boundaries. There are questions left unanswered and some passages that seem impossible to read and/or perform. The performers will shape the final interpretation immensely. And yes, the word accommodate is spelled incorrectly on the score...maybe I'll fix it. The first page is below, click here for PDF of the whole thing (about 5MB).