Are they music?
June 27, 2006 4:56 AM   Subscribe

Are they music? Unusual ideas about musical notation.
posted by Wolfdog (18 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Can you explain? The links by themselves don't really say why they are unusual.
posted by melt away at 5:21 AM on June 27, 2006 [1 favorite]


There's more on forms of musical notation here, although the ones above are far more avant-garde (ITTWIW). Like many things, conventional musical notation is just a rule of thumb. I don't want to use the words "arbitrary convention" because there's more to it than that, but you can break the rules. (To spectacularly beautiful effect.)
posted by Jofus at 5:40 AM on June 27, 2006


They use symbols familiar from conventional music notation, but they do not use any of the normal syntax. Many of them are musical equivalents of English sentences without identifiable subjects and predicates. A performer confronted with one of these without further instructions would have to make a lot of guesses about how to translate visual cues like space, density, color, direction, and proximity directly into sound.

I seem to remember an anecdote of Pink Floyd working this way in the studio once, making a massive, weird visual diagram of patterns and connections and then trying to somehow play it.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:41 AM on June 27, 2006


These are cool. Thanks for the post.
I can read standard notation, but I cannot, for the life of me, record a single musical idea this way. For years, I've been writing down the music I make with squiggles and patterns and (occaisionally) colors that make complete sense to me (but no one else :)
Thanks for showing me that I'm not COMPLETELY crazy.
posted by zerokey at 5:50 AM on June 27, 2006


Anybody who has spent much time with a sequencer is well acquainted with non-standard musical notation.
posted by empath at 6:07 AM on June 27, 2006


A performer confronted with one of these without further instructions would have to make a lot of guesses about how to translate visual cues like space, density, color, direction, and proximity directly into sound.

Absolutely, it's another way of having the composer one step removed from the process, which in many ways is what minimalism and algorithmic composition is all about. I'm pretty sure Tom Johnson (Don't really know the other guys) who's mentioned in the links there, was very interested in the question of musical intuition and the roles of the composer/performer/process in the creation of music.

Interesting stuff alright!
posted by TwoWordReview at 6:17 AM on June 27, 2006


Well, to answer your question, no, they're not music. Like any music notation, these are guidelines, instructions, blueprints for musicians to use in order to make sound. That resulting sound would be, um, the music. Of course, the examples of modern-era notation you've directed us to assume (generally) a much larger degree of personal interpretation on the part of the individual players than has been the case in centuries past. And many of them are indeed quite handsome as graphic works!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:26 AM on June 27, 2006


See also: The Scratch Orchestra.
posted by jack_mo at 6:31 AM on June 27, 2006


Marvelous stuff; thanks, Wolfdog. I love art like this. Some of these seem closer to visual poetry than music scores, though I'd be first to admit the line is blurry. Lots of similar stuff at the Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry (sort by images), and somewhat analogous questions were addressed in this thread.
posted by mediareport at 6:55 AM on June 27, 2006


Fantastic! I'll have to try to "play" some of these.

A cool and similar thing is how PureData can read graphical scores and generate music from them, like this.
posted by fleetmouse at 7:01 AM on June 27, 2006


And then there's soundpainting.
posted by josingsinthehall at 10:10 AM on June 27, 2006


Is any musical notation music? Music seems to be what you hear; notation is what you see. Is it not similar with language: written vs. spoken?
posted by DenOfSizer at 10:33 AM on June 27, 2006


Playing music from musical notation is a bit like painting-by-numbers; you never really get the same painting twice. This art makes me ask what parts of music cannot be written down because they are too minute to quantify.
posted by Citizen Premier at 10:48 AM on June 27, 2006


Or too emotional or personal.
posted by Citizen Premier at 10:48 AM on June 27, 2006


If any of you like "transgendered"-themed ambient music, here are some unusual scores from Terre Thaemlitz.
posted by Mr. Six at 11:38 AM on June 27, 2006


many of them are indeed quite handsome as graphic works! - flapjax

I was struck by that, too. There's several peices I would love to display in my home.
posted by raedyn at 12:31 PM on June 27, 2006


I'm guessing that Wolfdog's titular question is rhetorical--of course they're music. I've had a lot of fun with scores like this in the past. My only difficulty with individualistic methods of notation is that they can be (paradoxically) very limiting--while it might be fun and worthwhile to invest time in scores like these, and see what kinds of music can result, as a more mainstream practice anything like this fails in the interests of efficacy: much of art exists in dialogue among artists, by the works we create and share, and how that affects future work. Such unusual renderings, while beautiful and (sometimes) amazingly expressive, in practice keep these works from being more widely performed and disseminated.

Which doesn't detract from their inherent value in any way as works of art, but does limit the resonance such work could find out in the world.

(I've always loved composer Martin Mailman's definition of music: 'sound and silence, in time, with intent.')

(And the term 'music' is commonly used to refer both to actual sounding music, as well as notation, so that's kind of a pedantic point, IMO.)
posted by LooseFilter at 6:27 PM on June 27, 2006


and the grandaddy of them all, Cornelius Cardew's (Scratch Orchestra/AMM) Treatise.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 7:17 PM on June 27, 2006


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