Symphony #1498 "Line in Woooooow!"

What kind of notation is that?

Dev: Apparently I am so open-minded that my brain has fallen out. (In fact, it makes a cool lava lamp in a jar on my desk.)

Yes, "play whatever you want" can be a score. In fact, in contrast to this piece here, or any music notated traditionally, it's even an extremely clear instruction. Whether the result is musically pleasing is an entirely different question.

Now I do agree that for my taste too, this score here is too open. I would find it more musically effective to give somewhat clearer instructions along with this to go for a more structured and "composed" result. That means that I'm not entirely happy with the openness of the musical result this will produce.

This however doesn't mean the score is bad at expressing the intent of the composer, as long as the intent was to be very open. In the end, the composer is the only one who can really determine whether the chosen notation fitted the musical intent.

See, all notation is unclear. I have never in my life seen a form of music notation that defined all aspects of sound in all details (even a sonogram is restricted to its resolution). The performance of music has, through all time and cultures, always been a mixture between predetermined stuff (either notated or passed orally) and "improvisation" of certain musical aspects. The only difference between different sorts of music notation is the weighting of these elements.

To me it seems rather clear what this notation "means":
1. Decide on a method to translate a picture into sound.
2. Apply this method to this score.

Of course these instructions weren't in the score, which might have been a good idea. However, if you know that it's meant as a musical score and know nothing else about this piece, this approach seems fairly logical and self-evident, not even to mention that it has been preceded by music of other composers functioning in a similar way.

If you perform a music after a notation you don't understand, and the notation isn't standartised or explained, use your "common sense" (even though I hate that expression). It's quite possible that you interpret it differently than the composer intended, in which case the composer probably has made the mistake of either choosing the wrong notation, or not explaining it enough. If however the composer gets what she or he wanted, everything's fine with the notation, right?

So, unless you perform this piece with the best intentions (that should be expected from a performer) in a way that goes against what the author is willing to accept, I don't see a reason to criticise the notation, just perhaps the composition.

I'd be a bit annoyed if a composer gave me shit in a napkin and ask me to perform me, as I don't really like shit on my note stands. Besides, it stinks. But in theory there's nothing that inherently disqualifies it as a form of "music notation", in my opinion. Luckily this score here doesn't stink. (If treated normally.)

Yes, it is entirely possible that a rendition of this piece will turn out as a random improvisation. Well, in that case the notation won't have had any effect, but at least we heard some music, maybe even good one. But it's also quite possible that the musicians (if there's more than one playing) put some serious effort in playing this score (and I would expect them to) interprete this in many different ways, but maybe come together on a similar interpretation on some aspects, which will create a somewhat directed musical result that has something to do with the score. And maybe, the musicians even decide on a finding a way they can all apply to the interpretation of this, which will result in an even more stringent result. In fact, if the performers are "musically clever", they will be able to pull truly amazing and well-structured music out of a score like this. But god forbid performers actually made their own musical decisions and are more then mere note-reading machines...

I have often "improvised after pictures". But in the end it's merely a question of terminology whether you call it "improvising after pictures" or "interpreting an open, graphical score". Personally, I'd say the only difference is the original intention behind the creation of said pictures. And in this case here, the intention is clearly to be a musical score.

It has nothing to do with me fearing to be called "not open minded enough to get it". Probably more with my musical education starting out with lots of free improvisation, experimentation, and John Cage actually being one of the first composers I got in contact with during my piano lessons. I guess my brain fell out as soon as I started to play the piano, so please bear with me.

Okay....Jose is being a facetious and pretentious ass in what he's done, and I hope he never comes back. BUT, this raises a few issues:

Originally Posted by Dev

What am I willing to accept as a score? Notes? Relative pitches? Chord charts? Even written intructions would be fine, like "dissonant interval for 5 seconds, then perfect fifth for 3." But I mean, colored boxes? Lines? A painting? What am I supposed to get out of that? Sure, it evokes emotion, it's art - I can't argue with that - but a musical score? What instrument is that? What key, what notes, what harmonies, what tune? The answer is no one has a damn clue but won't ever admit it

Gardener nails it.

What Jose has so sarcastically presented can easily be musical. BUT, it would only work (I think) with serious improvisors. The "notes", "instrument", "key", "harmonies", "tune" are within the graphic to be interpreted and extracted by the performers. It's just a way of affecting/effecting the direction of an improvisation...



Anyway, I can't stand it when THIS bullshit is getting more attention than actual creative pieces of music...

Great picture you got there

To me the long and short of it is that this picture should be considered inspiration for writing a piece rather than the actual piece itself.

Originally Posted by Dev

To me the long and short of it is that this picture should be considered inspiration for writing a piece rather than the actual piece itself.

Fair enough....to others (myself included), graphical notation or other non-standard notational practices are perfectly valid, if used wisely and interpreted by musicians who take the music seriously, and are familiar with the language. You look at his "score" and see nothing musical, I can look at it and (regardless of his malicious intent) can see the music.

The problem arises when assholes like Jose here feel it's alright to make derogatory, sarcastic and facetious comments in the guise of satire.

...oh well.

But see the thing is, if I can play the same piece of "music" twice and come up with two completely different things, then how can the credit for those things go to the person who published a picture? I mean, what he's really publishing is an abstract emotional idea that may INSPIRE music, but not music itself.

To me it's like if someone painted a picture of me and I then claimed to have physically painted the picture and justified it because I was what the painting was based off of. Not the greatest analogy but that's basically how I see it.

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.

When Beethoven writes down a note as a 'stimulus' for the music which will be played when the performer sees that note, the note that he writes down is part of a very defined system of musical notation whereby those dots relate to a specific sound (agreed upon by composer and performer by their learning of that system). Within limits of course.

Drawing a picture, and asking someone to play it as music is totally different. In this case there is no pre-defined language of communication between him who draws the picture, and him who plays it. A yellow square means *nothing* beyond what the performer chooses to make of it. For this reason, the composer is the performer, and the picture is nothing more than a stimulus.
You can argue that it is actually music, but then that's just changing the definitions about. Certainly the picture is not music without someone to improvise upon it. (And yes, I mean improvise, not 'play'.)
I've been told to play from pictures before, so I know how it works. It's *entirely* dependent upon the performer -- the 'composer' of the picture has no more influence than that of a vague shaping/guiding one.

Well certainly, a page with notes on it isn't sound just like this isn't sound, and you've made some good points in that argument. The difference is, a Beethoven score uses a widely accepted form of notation whereas this does not. Again, traditional notes aren't the only way to write music, but anything that isn't written in the widely accepted/familiar notation style should come with instructions or in some way be obvious what each of the markings means. I'll reiterate my argument that sheet music should be instructions that are very apparent and understandable, even if the direction is "be very abstract." This picture simply fails to deliver any intruction.

Let's superimpose this argument onto something else: if I gave you a book but instead of english I used, say, pieces of maccaroni, and told you to read it, could you? No, no you could not, because it's maccaroni. However, if, with that book, I somehow conveyed what the maccaroni meant - if it points left it's an E, if it's red it's a Q, etc. - then you could read the book, even though it's very clearly abstract and unconventional. Otherwise, the maccaroni may suggest some sort of meaning, but without the instructions to translate "maccaroni" into "written language," what I've produced is simply a piece of art and nothing more. Just like this picture. It's art, sure, and it may inspire some emotion or even suggest some musical idea, but it isn't actually music. Just like, while maccaroni glued onto pages might suggest "murder mystery" to someone, well, that doesn't mean I've actually written a murder mystery does it?

I think what it's come to is that we both agree that this is ridiculously abstract and not really musical, but may inspire musical ideas, and the difference is you're willing to call it sheet music anyway and I'm not.