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BETWEENBETWEEN THOUGHTTHOUGHT THOUGHTANDAND SOUND SOUNDGRAPHIC NOTATION IN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC Curated by Alex Waterman, Debra Singer, and Matthew Lyons THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND FOREWORD debra singer Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music is a group exhibition that explores the intersection of drawing, thinking, and sound through experimental music scores by thirty-one composers who relinquish traditional notation in favor of their own invented graphic systems. Their compositions take myriad forms, ranging from abstract drawings, numerical series, and annotated photographs to videos and digital renderings-all of which are filled with complex pictograms, evocative mark-making, gestural symbols, and intricate codes of let- ters, numbers, and color. Co-organized by composer, cellist, and guest curator Alex Waterman, The Kitchen’s associate curator Matthew Lyons, and myself, the exhibition features work by Laura Andel, Robert Ashley, James Beckett, David Behrman, Cathy Berberian, Earle Brown, Cornelius Cardew, Tony Conrad, John Driscoll, Morton Feldman, Jon Gibson, Tom Johnson, Alison Knowles, Joan LaBarbara, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Lucier, Miya Masaoka, Kaffe Matthews, Meredith Monk, Gordon Mumma, Anthony Jay Ptak, Steve Roden, Marina Rosenfeld, James Saunders, Michael J. Schumacher, Elliott Sharp, Wadada Leo Smith, Yasunao Tone, David Tudor, Stephen Vitiello, and Christian Wolff. These artists represent two generations influenced by John Cage’s pioneering indeterminate compositions and chance operations begun in the late 1930s. Their highly personal notational vocabularies likewise originate in processes of experi- mentation, as they break with convention, finding alternative visual means to describe sounds and provoke a reciprocal relationship between performer and composer, empowering the former to participate in the improvisatory creation of works that are distinctly different each time they are performed. Generated in response to deficiencies in verbal language and descriptive terms as well as to the restrictiveness of traditional notational languages, graphic scores generally serve as a sort of open-ended, invented code that can be taught to, or shared with, others in order to be performed. Whether interpreted by the performer or by the viewer, graphic scores turn both into participants, placing them in the roles of translator or co-creator and serving as a catalyst for a process of social exchange. In addition to their performative and social functions, these alternative musical notation systems exist as stunning examples of abstract conceptual drawing. Like all forms of drawing, graphic scores are not traditionally aimed at closure or com- pletion. They do, however, offer a permanent, if loosely inscribed, documented record of creative intent, possessing a tactile presence that waivers between imme- diacy and deliberation. The score’s gestural mark serves as a material inscription of mental thought, reflecting the challenges of productively encapsulating time- 3 THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 based experience on a fixed, two-dimensional plane. Taken together, these graphic scores represent a common search for new forms of language that seek to fix and preserve the temporal and the ephemeral, a predicament that necessarily always exists at a critical juncture of transition and flux. (Debra Singer is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen) BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND Robert Ashley, In memoriam...Esteban Gomez (quartet) 1963 5 THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 Earle Brown, December 1952, 1952 6 BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND Earle Brown, Four Systems, 1954 THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND Christian Wolff, Or 4 People, 1994 THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 Joan La Barbara, Circular Song, 1975 BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND David Behrman, Cloud Music, 1974-1977 (In collaboration with Robert Watts andBob Diamond) THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 Alvin Lucier, Beethoven Piano Sonata, ???? 12 BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND Gordon Mumma, Meanwhile, a Twopiece, 1961 13 THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 David Tudor, Rainforest, 1973 16 BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND Tom Johnson, Blended Tones (Tonos mezclados), 1974 17 THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 Tom Johnson, Syncopated Texture (Textura sincopada), 1974 18 BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND THERE'Sa whole performance practice for certain kinds of music which simply hasn't established itself. It's really an issue of notation isn't it? The implication is that the notation has to be supplemented by the performance, no matter what. Of course, and what we wanted supplemented and what we want it to mean is not that clear. What's between the thought and the sound? christian wolff1 19 THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 20 BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SOUND (An Essay in Three Parts) alex waterman I Music notation is an intermediary between the imagined sound and its performance. Composition is the practice of organizing sounds in time, and notation determines how these sounds are to be read. In this sense, as the composer Cornelius Cardew has written, “notation and composition determine each other.” But what happens to notation when you want to say more than you can with a given language? Cardew differentiates “between creating a language in order to say something, and evolving a language in which you can say anything.”2 Graphic notation is just that sort of seemingly unrestricted language: it creates an open space for imagining, reading, translating, and performing. In the act of recording a series of nonstandard graphi- cal symbols and visual ideas on the page, the composer places the emphasis on trans- lation rather than interpretation. The performer’s translation then becomes a form of composing alongside the original author of the work. In the performance of music that is graphically scored the audience also partici- pates in the space “between thought and sound.” Though the audience may change from one performance to the next, it is mimetically inscribed in that time and place. As many performances are now recorded and mechanically reproduced for docu- mentary purposes, the audience defines the psychoacoustic space that sound travels through in real and recorded time. Not only that, it creates a collective memory and psychoacoustic presence in front of which the performers stage their reading. The poet and composer Chris Mann has described how this presence creates friction in the performance, not only a change in the air, but a sense of tension in the perfor- mative moment. Mann writes, “The space that interests me is the brainpan of the observer, the interlocutor, or the listener. [This] is the person who makes all the developments possible.”3 Indeed, audience receptivity can create a productive fric- tion for the performer, especially when the work relies on improvisation. The heightened self-awareness of the performer improvising in front of the audience is crucial to how the work is conveyed. It is the combination of this performance space and the reading space, or the distance between the performer and the score, that generates the friction necessary to make the new language, in its infancy, work. As Mann says: “It’s the resistance which makes the gift.”4 Graphic notation often incorporates symbols from other disciplines and systems- from geometry to physics, astronomy, statistical data, graphic design, concrete poetry, and the Dada diagram. The borrowed signs and signifiers of the graphic score are not intended to replace traditional musical notation. Likewise, the graphic 21 THE KITCHEN September 10 – October 20, 2007 score is not a “new” notation system because it does not supplant a notational canon; rather, it offers up new possibilities for reading musical ideas and suggests new ways of orchestrating sounds in time and space. Further, graphic notation, while incor- porating many elements of visual art and abstract representation, does not fall into the category of visual music. Visual music relies on the relativity of sense experi- ence, the ways in which the visual informs the sonic or vice versa, and often on synaesthesia.5 Finally, the graphic score is not static or absolute: each performance is one reading or realization that returns to its original open state after its rendition. Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade, 1919, a wedding present to his sister Suzanne and her husband, Jean Crotti, is a visual-art model of this open act of read- ing-a geometry book the couple tethered to the balcony railing, where the wind “worked out problems,” by tearing out pages, eventually leaving nothing but the binding. Duchamp’s suggestion of reading as performance impacted artists from John Cage to the Fluxus group to the Zaj group in Spain. Graphic scores, as I have argued in other writings, also transport the act of reading to the stage, engaging a reading that needs witnessing. The audience gathers to witness this reading.6 The opening of musical works in the 1950s and ‘60s-paralleled in the literary field by the emergence of the “open work”7-was a radical gesture that signaled the structural reorganization of musical and theatrical actions and the weakening of notions of authorial power established with the apotheosis of the individual in the Romantic period. Since then, poetry had been read in one’s head rather than