Graphic Notation

Every one of my encounters with graphic notation has captured my imagination. I remember the first time I opened the score to John Cage's Aria, Cornelius Cardew's Theses, and Cathy Berberian's Stripsody. The latter was especially meaningful because it contained actual illustrations of daily life and familiar human concerns. Though the score is meant to be performed by a single singer, I was captivated by the idea of a whole orchestra meditating on those images. The thought took me to a childlike place of glee. As I prepare for my upcoming graphic notation project, I'm certain that I want to use some literal representations of life alongside abstract shapes and symbols, to give the piece a programmatic framework.

I read an article from the excellent website New Music Box about an upcoming (well, in 2008) collection of graphic score samples in book form, meant to chronicle that particular development in music. One of the featured composers, Alison Knowles, has created, among other things, a score comprised of onion skin peelings scattered across a sheet of paper. I love the concept, both for its use of renewable, organic material (I'm sounding like a real Ithacan here) and for the quasi-mysticism of its process; music as divination. But Knowles said something in an interview that really affected me: when asked if she has any expectations about the outcome of her performances, she said: "I like to be really surprised". I think that statement gets at the core philosophy of the graphic notation movement. Perhaps many of these composers get more joy from the infinite musical potential of a visual concept than from a score that dictates every pitch and articulation. Sometimes it's more satisfying and stimulating to be surprised by the results of an experiment than to hear a good performance of our work in which we can predict every second of the proceedings.

Additionally, graphic notation opens up the realm of music to children, or anyone who has not been trained to understand standard music notation. I'm sure there are thousands of people out there who have something to express through music, but they find the standard systems too rigid or need a more open-ended stimulus.

I spent some time looking at score samples from the new collection mentioned on New Music Box. There is a nice dedicated website up and running where I was able to peruse to my heart's content. I was surprised to see that some of the scores still feature a 5-line staff and normal notes. They do, however, break the mold in other ways. One of the most uninspiring at face value was just a bunch of thin lines drawn across a blank sheet of staff paper, with some blue shading at the bottom. One score was an image of the solar system, with duos, trios and quartets between different groups of planets. Cute. And one of my favorites had a few different tuplets in interlocking circles, like a Venn diagram, surrounded by colored circular splotches. I liked staring at that one and contemplating the implications of the materials on the page.

Not the original image from the Notations 21 website, but this is at least part of the score.

Graphic notation has a really interesting psychological effect. The academic in me is stimulated by graphic possibilities in relation to my knowledge of musical gestures and textures, but the child in me responds to the visceral shapes and figures, and whimsy of seeing a stuffy system bent and twisted into something more playful.

The New York School

There is a quotation early on in David Nicholls' essay on The New York School (concerning visual art and music), which itself is taken from a John Cage article, that made me think for a while: "Cowell remarked at the New School before a concert of works by Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and myself, that here were four composers who were getting rid of the glue. That is: where people had felt the necessity to stick sounds together to make a continuity, we four felt the opposite necessity to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves." This is a daring endeavor, because it puts a lot of responsibility in the hands of the performers. John Cage's Music of Changes, for example, lacks precise metric notation; clusters of notes are scattered around long, empty staves, allowing for many different approaches to the pacing and execution of the piece. To take this idea a step further, Cage also stressed that the music should be free of intention. WHOA. That's the really radical idea, because what it does is eliminate (to some degree) the composer's ego. Composers can get so caught up in specifics of notation and worrying about public perception of a piece, but Cage and his friends were telling themselves and composers outside their circle to LET GO. But this approach is also strangely paradoxical, because first of all, even if the pitches and rhythms produced by chance procedures are free of an outside context, the piece as a whole bears the distinct intention of being a piece of chance music, and a sort of a musical experiment. Maybe I'm being too nitpicky.

The commentary on composer Earle Brown in the this article intrigued me; Morton Feldman apparently described him as an important link between American and European music in the twentieth century, and that several composers ripped off his techniques. I listened to Brown's piece 4 Systems first, and I found myself conflicted about my opinion. At face value, the music held little value for me, but then I remembered I needed to LET GO and take the music on its terms as an experiment. Luckily I was able to view the score; I would say that the success of this music hinges almost entirely on being able to view the composer's graphic score (ironically the same approach I have to ultra-complex composers like Elliott Carter and Kaikhosru Sorabji). The recording that I listened to struck me as boring, but looking at the score I kept telling myself that the pianist was simply not being creative enough with the material. Earle Brown specifies in a footnote that the thickness of marks can indicate either clusters or dynamics. This particular pianist went for the clusters. I would be interested to take this piece into a practice room and see what kind of interpretation I would come up with.

Earle Brown's piece Folio was slightly more interesting to listen to, as I heard a definite continuity with certain motifs. I didn't have the score handy for this one, but it wasn't a great loss. I still would like to know what it looks like.

Brown's program notes for both these pieces are surprisingly academic and dry. Maybe he was actually very intellectual, but these notes seem like a conscious attempt to appear hyper-intelligent to hide insecurity.

Next I listened to Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel, and it was beautiful. Maybe it seemed more beautiful in contrast to the Brown pieces, but I feel like I really "got it". I looked up images of Rothko Chapel to aid in the experience. It was nice to see musical and visual factions of the New York School complement each other. I was surprised at the abrupt ending of the recording, but then I realized that there was MORE. Much more. This made me happy. I'll have to listen to the whole thing in one sitting some other time.

Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas.

This piece bears some marks of conventional compositional technique. Besides the obvious tonal centers and perceivable meter, Feldman paces his instrumentation skillfully so that the choir entrance is a real revelation. The overall atmosphere of the piece is meditative, but ominously, mysteriously so. I think this fits the intent of the Rothko Chapel building; it is a space designed for meditation and non-denominational spirituality, but its dark, minimalist layout may lead one more to ponder the question of God's existence and other deep questions about life.

The other Feldman piece on the listening list was King of Denmark. I've looked at the score to this before, and I found a sample online:

Within the grids are different specific musical events. This system has slightly more composer control than Earle Brown's 4 Systems. The events are also more spaced out, so the listener can focus on each one. This piece is not my absolute favorite, but it is a nice exploration of a percussion setup.

I listened to a couple of Christian Wolff's Exercises (18 and 3). Another instance in which I wish I had the score. It was hard to tell which elements were strictly notated, if at all, and which were chance elements. I heard some recurring ostinati, and the the musical language was unified. The feel was alternately jazzy/bluesy and improvisatory. It was fun to hear a saxophone in a piece of concert music, since I just finished writing a piece for alto sax.

Last but not least in this section is Christian Wolff's Long piano. I looked up some program notes for this and found that he was partially inspired by a certain piece of artwork: a 154-foot long sequence of almost 1000 silk-screened enamel plates. He also mentions that the piece contains many quotations, from "L'homme armé" to Schumann's Kinderszenen. I am usually drawn to very long piano pieces, and this is no exception. I must say the opening movement did not overly impress me; it meanders in a free, organic way, but gives little sense of the massive scope at hand. I'll have to spend an evening with this one and follow it to its end.

American Modernism

Ugh, American Modernism. I'm in a pretty cynical, dismissive mood for this one, not just because I'm a composer and composers like to be hypercritical of music they don't like, but also because I'm experiencing a pretty huge crisis of my own artistic endeavors. Composition has been an increasingly frustrating and unrewarding struggle, and I'm seriously questioning whether I should be doing this shit anymore.

So here it goes.

I've given Elliott Carter's music a try. I really have. In my undergrad years I remember several times that I checked out the scores of all of his string quartets from the library and listened to each one multiple times, hoping to gain some real insight and find a lasting pleasure besides just marveling at some of the incredibly complex rhythms and virtuosic string lines. At this point, I do appreciate the First Quartet and understand its importance to music history; it was Carter's first big experiment in metric modulation (after his cello sonata), it contains sections that give the impression of simultaneous but unrelated events, and the language is fresh but loosely grounded in a sense of logic.

Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Gershwin all died before they were 40.
But this guy just kept on living...

But the rest of the quartets escape me. Their most unique elements are impossible to perceive without a score in hand or with a live ensemble in front of you. I know that Quartet No. 2 has each musician simultaneously playing different material, conveying very different moods, for the entirely of the piece. It's a fascinating idea, but the results are surprisingly unsatisfying. For the twenty-minute duration of this piece, there is not one consistent motif or rhythmic idea to latch onto. The relentless unpredictability of the music becomes, ironically, predictable. One only perceives slight textural changes, and the most palatable parts are the slow sections, where Carter's harmonies are presented in slow motion and can be processed by a human brain.

The Boosey and Hawkes complete edition of Elliott Carter quartets has an introductory essay by the first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet, where he talks about the process of rehearsing and playing these pieces. He claims that they provided him and his fellow musicians with some of the most thrilling performance experiences of their lives. I can imagine the adrenaline rush of responding to other players with laser-beam precision to nail all the polyrhythmic textures, and being as intimate with the music as possible. But do music critics or the general public say that being at an Elliott Carter concert was one of the most exciting or impactful events of their lives? Do people converse about these string quartets and say "Oh, I love that one passage that goes like this...."? Absolutely not. So this music seems to be for everyone except the audience. Elliott Carter enjoyed writing it, I suppose, though this music must have been exhausting to live with and to edit, and the musicians can enjoy the pride of mastering some of the most complicated music ever written. But this whole stream of music travels further and further into complete irrelevance, away from the heartbeat of humanity.

Roger Sessions leaves me similarly ambivalent, but his Third Piano Sonata is easier for me to grab onto than the Carter quartets. This piece has an attractive first movement that strikes a nice balance between Impressionism and blues. The textures are definitely pianistic, and he throws in some chunky Ivesian chords. His Third Symphony has the advantage of orchestral colors and some discernable motifs, so it's easier to follow through the long haul. Still not very fun though.

Milton Babbitt's essay "Who Cares If You Listen?" makes me really freaking angry. In summary, he states that because of the trend in contemporary music toward heady academism, it should be relegated to the world of academia and created only for people who will fully understand it. What irks me so much about his conclusion is that he seems so self-satisfied, so assured in the security of his musical movement, not wondering if maybe it is just a brief phase. He forgets that at one time music was actually created to stir the heart, not just the mind.

I read Claudio Spies' essay on the appreciation of Schoenberg's music, but I have nothing to say about it. I just can't care about it right now.

Hopefully my next post will be less informed by personal concerns and the turbulence of my mood swings. Tonight I'm signing off with a clip from The Lawrence Welk Show, which is the complete opposite of American Modernism in both its functionally tonal music and its portrayal of a naive innocence that never really existed anywhere, but which I long for sometimes when life becomes too much to handle.

Aesthetics of the Avant Garde

I read an essay by Arthur Danto called "The Abuse of Beauty". This piece attempts to approach art through a philosophical lens, referencing figures like Kant and Hegel, and commenting on the intersection of natural beauty and artistic beauty.

One section of the text stood out to me: a discussion of Jesus in art. As a former Christian in the process of trying to make a comeback, I had never realized the significance that Jesus' suffering, as depicted in art, is a very ugly thing at face value. This is a man being whipped, nailed to a cross, and hung up to die a slow death. Of course Christians see the beauty behind all of this, because of what the crucifixion means (or perhaps because they become desensitized to the images of torture after years in the church). The Passion of the Christ, the ultraviolent film that follows the events of Jesus' death, and little else, is the epitome of this torture as art. Danto's essay mentions how representations of the crucifixion in art have varied in severity over the centuries, as a reaction to different public taste. In this way Jesus' crucifixion is almost like a weathervane for artistic taste in general, because it the most universally accepted artistic subject that happens to also be "ugly".

Because violence is so central to the story of Christianity, it makes sense that Christians seem to have no problem with endorsing films like Saving Private Ryan or Gladiator, because all the violence has a noble cause at its root. They identify with those violent struggles, and it ends up informing their critical taste. At the same time, they are extremely cautious about movies portraying sex, even if it is good and healthy intercourse between a married couple. Sex is simply more taboo than violence in Christian culture.

When it comes to my own taste in art, especially music, I CRAVE dissonance. It satisfies me like food. Does that make me weird? Danto would argue no. He is of the opinion that after many artistic boundaries were shattered in the twentieth century, certain personal tastes that were formerly on the fringe entered the mainstream.

But it all relates back to the revelation that anything can be beautiful. A still life of flowers is beautiful, sure, but so is a photo of unemployed adults during the Depression selling apples on the street, because STRUGGLE is beautiful. And when we recognize those humans qualities in art (struggle, survival, desperation), we make an empathetic connection.

We should also keep in mind that the goal of art should be to provoke any number of emotions. This is a difficult situation, though, because a piece of art created for mere shock value, with empty content, provokes anger in the viewer; the viewer feels manipulated. But we should find equal joy in engaging with art that pleases us and art that makes us uncomfortable or unbearably sad. It's a romantic sort of ambition: feeling the full of spectrum of emotions and just being excited to feel.

This Danto essay is one I'll be rereading a lot. I feel that I can't adequately respond to all the deep philosophy at the moment, but as it sinks in more perhaps I'll offer more thoughts.

Partch, Johnston, and Nancarrow

Harry Partch is probably the most purely radical composer, and person, that we have discussed so far. All of the distinguishing elements of the previous composers are present in Partch, but taken to the extreme. He disliked Western culture and high society, so he spent a significant amount of time as a vagabond, living the low life with other wanderers on the edge of daily sustainability. I love one of the passages from Ben Johnston's profile "The Corporealism of Harry Partch: "...after his hobo years he just had no fear of society or its opinions. It had done its worst to him, yet he was still going; so in a large part he had won his freedom." I really admire this quest, in a detached sort of way, since I strongly desire a similarly enlightening experience but would never be able to do it myself. After doing this, he must have felt even more disconnected from the manners of concert music. In his own words: "'The presumptions that lie behind the art of this culture are no good for me. I'm going to start all over and make something I can live with.'"

Amen, brother.

Partch even rejected the avant-garde circles of the time, thinking them too much a product of overcivilized minds. That's about as independent as a composer can get. And of course he famously created his own instruments in different tuning systems. I admit I have never listened to his music, but it's never too late to start.

One other comment that ties Partch back to the avant-garde discussion: he remarked that perhaps preserving recordings of his music would represent the definitive form of his art, since it would be nearly impossible (and inauthentic) for someone else to recreate his painstakingly handmade instruments. This is the complete opposite of our initial discussion about the avant-garde and experimentalism; for Partch, building the instruments was the experiment, and the part that could not be replicated. The music itself was meant to be played in a definitive way.

Listening to Barstow for the first time was a somewhat disappointing experience. I was expecting a mind-expanding homemade instrument, but I only heard a guitar, albeit in an interesting alternate tuning. This piece seems to belong more to a folk tradition than anything. The musical material is pretty conservative and repetitive. The concept of the piece is nice, though: drawing attention to the stories of the types of people society forgets, but that Partch must have been intimately involved with. The closing movement is sort of a dramatic peak, since the text is the most desperate and it covers several psychological moods.

I highly enjoyed the website where one can "play" Partch's instruments. I felt like I understood him much more after hearing the quirky tones of different marimbas and kitharas.

Next I listened to Ben Johnston's String Quartet No. 4, specifically the Amazing Grace movement. This was also harmonically conservative - but only for the first half. Then is devolved into a glorious exploration of timbres, rhythmic development, and it took on an epic scope. There was definitely an element of Ivesian transcendentalism in this piece, in taking the most familiar hymn tune and finding something new and noble to do with it.

Johnston's Suite for Microtonal Piano didn't make a huge impact on me. I heard evidence of great craft, and the alternate tuning did allow for more expressive timbres than a normal piano, especially in higher registers (and particularly in movement 4). But I don't think these devices were used as creatively as Ives in his Three Quarter-Tone Pieces, which include effects like glissandi between two pianos. That said, the Suite for Microtonal Piano is still a very appealing piece.

Conlon Nancarrow's music is usually a fun listen. He parallels Cowell in his exploitation of the piano. I had heard some of the player piano studies before and got familiar with their dense textures and rhythmic complexity that are clearly unplayable by a human. In these two studies though, I heard some new effects. No. 25 is full of super-fast arpeggiated chords that become quite annoying after a while, but are redeemed by the wonderfully insane ending. The piece ends in a flash of colors.

I had to take a deep breath at the beginning of No. 36, which contains basically the same arpeggiated chords. Maybe this music caught me on a bad day, but it was just tiresome to me. The cross-rhythms were fascinating, though, and I enjoyed the complete liberation of the piano from traditional timbres. It ended up sounding semi-electronic and full of sound effects, almost like an arcade game. Seriously. I think Nancarrow had a prophetic vision of kids in the 1980's playing Space Invaders. Or Asteroids. Maybe?

Cowell, Antheil, Varèse, and Crawford Seeger

Reading sections of Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources provides a nice contrast to Ives' Essays Before A Sonata. While Ives was writing about philosophical ideas and how to unite the head and the heart in music, Cowell was precise and scientific. In attempting to bring recognition to the overtone series and its potential in composition, he gives some concrete examples of chords that produce strong overtones and includes a chart. Some of this information was startlingly new to me, and I felt almost embarrassed that I had not investigated overtones already. Cowell matter-of-factly states "If we take the first six overtones [of a C major chord], we arrive at the following chord: C, E, G, G sharp, B flat, B, D, F". I couldn't believe this. I actually sat down at the piano and played all those notes together. It was even more exotic than I expected. Unfortunately I was playing on the electric piano in my apartment and could not experiment with actual acoustic phenomena.

Henry Cowell's overtone chart.

Cowell also gives a whirlwind tour of pioneering techniques in music since Monteverdi, beginning with the statement "It has become popular to assert that most great composers were accepted fully in their own time, and that many of them did not introduce new material". Of course his ensuing discussion of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Liszt, and Debussy shows just how forward-looking they were in different ways. All of this rhetoric not-so-subtly prepares us to accept Cowell's techniques as the next step. The rest of the text concerns other musical devices like quarter-tones (where he gives a shout-out to Ives), sliding tones, and research into undertones, which blew my mind a little more.

After reading all of this heady stuff it was relieving to listen to two Cowell pieces I had heard before, but several years ago. "Tiger" is a great starting point to examine Cowell's work with overtones. He alternates textures of aggressive tone clusters with pauses that let overtones swirl into the air. Each of those moments was really magical. The tones are like musical ghosts, so ethereal and hard to pin down. It is also worth noting that this piece is more concise and unified in its material than a typical Ives piece.

"The Banshee" brings back great memories of my roommate, Nathan, in my senior year of undergrad, who learned to play this piece. I saw firsthand the logistical ordeals of practice and performance; since it is played entirely on the piano strings, Nathan brought little colored tabs with note names to the practice room and painstakingly placed them on the strings to keep track of the notes. He also became easily tired from awkwardly hunching over the sounding board. But he said something really enlightening about the piece: "It's frustrating sometimes as a pianist because we are so detached from our instrument. We sit at the very edge of it and play. But woodwind players and string players get to embrace their instruments. And when I play The Banshee, I sort of get to do that."

That said, The Banshee is an incredible piece. Nathan played it well but never quite like what I heard on the recording. I seriously thought I was hearing tremolo strings at the beginning. The sounds are intense and have wild psychological effects. I love how Cowell experiments with different intervallic possibilities. I heard some thirds near the 2-minute mark that produced absolutely wonderful colors. This piece is really quite terrifying in a way. It is true to its name.

It was humbling to read a compilation of bad reviews of Cowell's performances. Many of the phrases from those reviews surely have a place in Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective. My favorite was "[he] spanked his instrument in chunks of tone". I suppose the point of all these reviews is point out the difficulty of being both a pioneer and a good-quality composer, to unite experimentation with craft. Cowell, just like Ives, probably felt the weight of trying to move music forward while also trying to write good pieces to demonstrate new techniques, and to accept that perhaps no one would really understand it yet.

What I took away most from Christine Fena's piece on Cowell was how shocking it must have been for audiences to see the piano opened up and played on the strings or the wood. Some of these techniques have become almost cliché in contemporary music, but the horror and disgust of seeing that legendary instrument "boxed" by Cowell must have been incredibly uncomfortable.

George Antheil's Ballet mécanique features some of the most purely mechanical piano writing I know of. Antheil embraced the futurism movement of the early twentieth century, in which artists celebrated machines and things in motion. Sure enough, the video for this piece includes many spinning objects, a woman on a swing, and industrial images. The ensemble, with its repeated patterns and nonstop motion, becomes a sort of machine, but it's a very festive machine, with the occasional siren like a fanfare.

Everything moves in Ballet mécanique.

I started playing Varèse's Ionisation and thought "The sirens are back!" Though this is still futurist music, it has a more sophisticated texture than Ballet mécanique. The percussion writing is quite spectacular; this was a turning point in percussion history for sure. At times the writing borders on controlled chaos, but other times it simply explores complex divisions of the beat.

I was not familiar with Ruth Crawford Seeger at all before this, but I'm glad I am now. Her piece Piano Study in Mixed Accents sounds like it was written yesterday, but now I understand that in her time she laid the groundwork for future composers like Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez and others who concern themselves with constant motion and offbeat accents. I will have to investigate more of her piano music.