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Old May 26 2008, 3:14 PM
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Well, you can play any music twice and come up with two very different results. And yes, technically it isn't music, but neither is a Beethoven score. It turns into music as soon as its played. If, as a composer, you don't perform your pieces yourself (and it isn't electronic music or something like that) you aren't the only author of the acoustic result, i.e. the music. Every form of music that involves both a composer and a performer is a collaborative work. This collaboration is extremely different depending on whether you have a piece by Ferneyhough, Perotin, Thelonious Monk, Couperin, or Lutoslawski. There is a lot of notated music that doesn't specify any pitches, rhythms, harmonies, dynamics, articulations, instrumentation, spatial positioning or any combinations of these and there is a lot of notated music which is meant to be understood in a very free manner and requires the performer to improvise to a great degree. Now, while I admit that just giving a "picture" without any verbal instructions is on an extreme side of openness, it's certainly not unheard of. There simply is no standard to what parameters a score must specify in order to count as a composition.

You can very well argue that in a Jazz standard or a "Prélude non mesuré" by Couperin the musical output depends a lot more on the performer than the composer. And that a piece like this one here depends almost entirely on the performer. And at the same time a piece like Stockhausen's "Klavierstück I" pretty much devaluates the performer and is almost entirely a creation of the composer. But in all those cases there is some influence by all parties who take a part in the creation of the music and be it only in the form of "inspiration".

To repeat: I don't think a composer creates music if he writes down notes. As long as you're just writing down notes (or "pictures") all you can possibly do is to communicate an idea of music. I hate defining music as it's bound to cause arguments, but if there's one thing I personally feel sure about when it comes to music, is that music is an art of sound. Not of writing.
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