The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music Writing, Music
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This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 28 Sep 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music James Saunders Writing, Music Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315172347.ch2 Michael Pisaro Published online on: 16 Sep 2009 How to cite :- Michael Pisaro. 16 Sep 2009, Writing, Music from: The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music Routledge Accessed on: 28 Sep 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315172347.ch2 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. ASHGATE RESEARCH 2 COMPANION Writing, Music Michael Pisaro Encountering Cage My first contact with experimental music began, as it does for many, with the music of John Cage. seeing his published scores for the first time, I encountered the work of a hand, and only later, because of the curiosity this created, that of a mind and ear. Looking at Winter Music (1957), the first score of his I saw – a page was printed on the back of George Flynn’s magnificent 1974 recording of the piece1 – I recognized an unfamiliar visual sensibility. It was simultaneously clean and clear, oddly formal and hard to decipher, as if it was inventing a new kind of formality based on a different kind of logic than what I had encountered. Everything, it seemed, was designed for the particular piece and was there to indicate a definite style of performance, but the beauty of the object was also striking, perhaps because it seemed like such an odd place to find beauty. Later I learned that Cage had created the score by making points where there were imperfections on the paper he was using. These were turned into notes and the collections of points were aligned to staves and clefs to give the points relative pitch heights. The singular visual appearance grew out of direct contact with the page. The score was on paper, but it was also a reading of the paper. In a significant way, it was paper. It was the first music I had seen that had confronted the writing of a score as material, as a part of the composition itself. The score, while being instructions for making sound, was also an image, and, in the way one had to read it, a poem. Like a poem, it did not have to be read linearly (one could begin anywhere) and like a poem it seemed to demand multiple readings to be grasped. Once you are attuned to this way of looking, and hearing, and thinking – where the writing of the score, the process of its creation and the object of the score, in all its materiality, are seen to play a decisive role in the music itself, you can find it everywhere in experimental music: in Morton Feldman’s copying procedures, in Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise and The Great Learning, in the curved eighths and the prose of Christian Wolff, in Lucier’sQueen of the South, in Water Yam by George 1 John Cage, ‘Winter Music’, in George Flynn, Wound/John Cage Winter Music. Finnadar Records, Qd 9006 (1974). Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 18:09 28 Sep 2021; For: 9781315172347, chapter2, 10.4324/9781315172347.ch2 The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music Brecht, even in Cage’s 4’33”. Through all this music it is clear that experimental music confronts ideas about writing. Experimental music does not make a fetish of the score.2 A score, no matter how beautiful, is still to be understood as a set of symbols whose goal is to be interpreted, in most cases, as sound (and silence). At the same time this music raises, again and again, fundamental questions about the conditions (that is, the mechanics, the system of reference, the function and the process) of writing: as an exploration of what the hand can do, as a way of giving performers directions, as a frame of reference for sounds, as a model for certain kinds of musical behaviour. This practice has continued and has been amplified in much of the most challenging music being written today. Because experimental music is still a living practice and the full history of the practice has yet to be written, one can start anywhere. Because the network spans decades, with one composer picking up where another left off, and because the development of the ideas discussed here is not linear, but multi- dimensional, concept will be a better system of organization than chronology. In a sense, within experimental music, the notion that the writing of the score is inseparable from the music is so pervasive, it may seem that there is nothing really important to say. There is some value to this idea: where this music really lives is in the doing of it, not the talking about it. someone who has worked her way through the pieces, preparing performing versions of the scores, will know much more than if she has only read about what has been done. What might be most useful then, is to make a map with a legend, listing and briefly discussing some of the writing tools that continue to be used, without any attempt to be exhaustive in our explanations. We will follow some of the trajectories in this work to see where they have led and might be leading, with the hope that those who become interested will follow some of the many pathways down into this underground network. The Solo for Piano The Solo for Piano from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra from 1957–58 is a good place to start.3 Its 63 pages contain a compendium of notational styles that, despite 2 It might be said that what is sometimes called ‘graphic music’ does make something of a fetish of the score – by giving priority to the visual image over the practical (or impractical) production of sound. However, no discussion of the writing of experimental music can avoid this lively discipline (and I will discuss a few examples of the music briefly in the ‘Image’ section of this chapter). The effect of the orientation towards the image in these works has also had a strong and continuing effect on the production of more traditional looking scores. nevertheless my central focus will be on those ways of writing that stop somewhere short of the production of ‘scores to be looked at’ (though many of the scores discussed here are nice to look at) – and towards those ways of writing that are most oriented towards producing radical sounding results. 3 Here I will use the Solo for Piano as a starting point to discuss a great variety of notations, by Cage and others. An excellent and more extensive discussion of the Solo, however, 28 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 18:09 28 Sep 2021; For: 9781315172347, chapter2, 10.4324/9781315172347.ch2 Writing, Music A 3:59 5K il:3* £ AK Example 2.1 Some of the notations found in John Cage’s Solo for Piano from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), extract from p. 49 can be found in James Pritchett’s The Music of John Cage (Cambridge, 1993). 29 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 18:09 28 Sep 2021; For: 9781315172347, chapter2, 10.4324/9781315172347.ch2 The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music some wonderful performances, seems far from being exhausted in implication and in practice, even 50 years after its creation. It begins as a collection of points. The point, as in Winter Music, Atlas Eclipticalis (1961) and Music for Piano (1952–56), will be the basic unit from which all of the other images spring. These points may occur by themselves, but more often are grouped to form simultaneities or attached in various ways to form lines (or melodies, explicit or implied, as in notation J). The points, along with lines, clefs, stems, dynamics and so on, form the basis of many other, more ambiguous kinds of objects. There are, for example, clusters of dots and lines that form complex patterns (notation AO), harmonic landscapes (A) and islands (T, p. 16), geographical [free hand] (BC, p. 47) or geometrical [ruled] outlines (such as G), overlapping geometries (AR, p. 31), collections of numbers (U, BI), exceptionally beautiful hybrids of numbers, shapes and musical notations (AY, BK), and drawings of the piano for locations (BT). The whole score is laid out with a sensibility for blank space, including three blank pages (15, 32, 61), that probably has Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés as its inspiration. There are few rivals to this score in physical beauty (though there is obviously much more to the piece than this). One aspect of this beauty, and something we will return to a few times in this chapter, is the fact that this score is drawn entirely by hand.