In The Score, American composers on creating “classical” music in the 21st century.

I.

Musical educations are full of standard maxims, bits of shared wisdom intended to keep us true to our craft. One that I’ve been aware of ever since I began serious musical study in the 1990s is this: The score is not the music.

As a maxim, it has its merits. It’s an important warning for analysts and composers to never forget that most music itself comes from performance.

But it has its limits, too. It seems quite obvious that no individual performance of, say, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is the entire work. In the end, I don’t think it’s possible to completely localize the phenomenon of Beethoven’s Seventh — it seems to exist as an impossible amalgamation of the infinite real and potential performances that reasonably conform to the instructions in the score. A performance that failed to hew to the majority of specified pitches and rhythms would surely not count, nor would a performance without even a hint of expression beyond that which is explicitly notated. The precise nature of the work can never be exhaustively realized, and that’s a wonderful thing.



Some, though, take the statement to its literal extreme. The composer Dennis DeSantis, for instance, in a manifesto on notation, writes:

Notation should be considered a set of instructions for performers. And nothing else.

Notation is not art, nor is it a program note. Perhaps most importantly, it is not music.

Augenmusik is useless at best and destructive at worst. Baude Cordier, George Crumb and others were wrong to use it. This fact does not diminish their value as composers—only as copyists.

In this view, the score is essentially a mere set of instructions with no intrinsic artistic merit. I strongly disagree, and would like to talk about the artistic value of some such scores. They go by many different names — graphic scores, Augenmusik (eye music), visual notation and others. I prefer the phrase “ergodic notation,” which I derive from the game and literary theorist Espen J. Aarseth’s phrase “ergodic literature.” These are writings that require some amount of effort to read beyond simply moving one’s eyes and flipping pages. There are ancient examples, such as Egyptian texts that span several walls across several rooms or, more recently, Islamic calligrams that render Arabic words like Allah and Bismillah in many different directions and scales. There are also modern examples like the novels of Milorad Pavić and Mark Z. Danielewski.

A look at a page from Danielewski’s 2000 novel “House of Leaves” will help set the scene for the musical examples.

Copyright 2000 by Mark Z. Danielewski, Pantheon Books

This is a page from the ninth chapter, which functions as the literary equivalent of a labyrinth. There are footnotes within footnotes; some text is sideways, upside down or even backwards; and one footnote (part of which can be seen inside the blue box in the example) reads as if it were tunneling through the pages. Much like a maze has some corridors that are direct, some that meander and some that dead end, the chapter has expository text, poetic text and virtually unrelated text. Many would describe the dead ends as artistically non-functional, existing only to help realize a gimmick that is ultimately unrelated to the “real” content of the novel, but they are just differently functional. Artistic function is complex and variegated, and as we’ll see in the notation examples below, can exist at many different points in a continuum.

Let’s examine a few scores starting with the two composers mentioned by DeSantis.

II.

Ergodic notation is not new. Baude Cordier, a composer of the ars subtilior style, wrote during the first half of the 15th century. He created many graphic scores, one of the most elegant of which is for a piece called “Belle, bonne, sage.”

It’s a love song, so it’s rendered in the shape of a heart. The performance is essentially unaffected by the shape, but we needn’t condemn it — it’s a beautiful addition to the artwork. Furthermore, not every visual element is purely decorative, the red notes indicate a rhythmic alteration that was otherwise very difficult to notate at the time.

George Crumb, an important contemporary composer, has many examples that are similarly only visually functional. Here’s the last movement of his “Makrokosmos,” Vol. I.

No, the music doesn’t sound like a spiral (whatever that would mean), but there are other Crumb examples wherein the ergodic notation is also musically functional.

Copyright 1972 by C.F. Peters Corporation

This is a page from “Black Angels,” Crumb’s 1970 piece for amplified string quartet. Make no mistake; this music could be rendered fairly easily in standard notation. However, notice that the four staves — one for each instrument — constantly melt together then split apart again. This signifies moments where the instruments are briefly playing identical music before once again separating. Crumb’s notation viscerally encapsulates the extent to which the performers should sound like insects that are continually moving in and out of a singular swarm; the music sounds like it looks. Furthermore, in a standard version of this score the performers would have far less rhythmic flexibility. This is also true of the next example, a movement from Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” which gains both rhythmic and structural variability from its non-standard shape.

Copyright 1971 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd. Reprinted by Permission.

This movement is essentially a duet for the flute and singer. The vocalist sings the vertical lines that form the bars of the birdcage while the flute capriciously flits, in any order, between the five fragments in the horizontal cross-brace. As a result, any two performances will have a substantially different form, an effect difficult or impossible to obtain with standard notation.

Finally, let’s examine a piece that could not conceivably exist in anything like standard notation.

Copyright © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc.

This is a page from John Cage’s “Aria.” Cage wanted the piece to be singable by any male or female vocalist, and he wanted them to freely choose 10 different singing styles that could be rapidly alternated. Each style is represented by a different color and the shape of the squiggles indicates the general melodic contour. He was interested in constructing a complex intermingling of disparate styles and genres, but wanted to leave the particular pitches, durations and timbres to the performer’s discretion. There are surely other ways to notate such an artwork, but none of them are remotely standard or graphically straightforward.

I’ve often heard it said that such scores are perhaps interesting, but that the music must “stand on its own.” This seems reasonable initially, but I’d like to suggest that it’s actually incoherent. The score and the music are both inextricable components of the final artwork, and it makes no more sense to say that one or the other must stand on its own than to say that a novel’s plot must stand on its own irrespective of the characters or language. Indeed, the creative process of devising such a piece utterly fuses the visual and musical. I’d like to demonstrate this by looking at a piece I wrote, not because it’s on par with the examples above (it’s a double bogey at best), but because I can only reliably report on my own creative process.

III.

For reasons of aesthetic symmetry, I wanted the third movement of a piece titled “brokenAphorisms_12-14” to have a cello part notated in the shape of a simple circle in the center of the page. This entirely visual prerequisite nevertheless forced certain musical ideas to take root; particularly that the line should be a repeating ostinato, since there’s little point in using a notational circle if it will only be circumnavigated once. However, there were also entirely musical prerequisites. I wanted the cello line to occur three times, each longer than the last. I also wanted the first statement to be quite simple and consonant, the second to be complex and dissonant, and the third to be a purified version of the second; combining its general shape with the simpler soundworld of the first.

These artistic prerequisites are in significant tension. Repeated revolutions around a circle clearly imply static musical ideas — their content and length can’t change. After severe procrastination and self-recrimination, my brain suddenly offered me the idea of colored notation. The circle would contain all of the notes necessary for each iteration, but for the first statement, the cellist would only play red notes for every spin. For the second set of revolutions, the player would read blue and red notes, and in the final statement the black notes would be added as well, generating progressively longer and more discordant versions. The portion of the score in question is below, and the three sound files are recordings of the isolated cello part for each successive set of revolutions.

Pat Muchmore

And so I lost some of the visual simplicity I had planned on, and — though I was able to retain the progressive lengthening of each line — the move back to relative harmonic simplicity for the last statement had to be abandoned. In a sense, these prerequisites and others were creative dead ends, but, as in Danielewski’s labyrinth above, they weren’t wasted or non-functional. They are still part of the shape of the final work, even if only negatively.

Of course precisely these types of artistic compromises are always part of the creative process, but one thing I like about ergodic notation is that the apparent (though artificial) division of the process into visual and musical ideas throws these decisions into sharp relief. I’m never as aware of the compositional development as I am when devising a visual score. Furthermore, these ideas ended up informing the rest of the composition, including earlier movements. It gave me a heretofore elusive structural cohesion across the work, and provided the rest of the process with that eerie and all-too-rare aura of a piece composing itself in spite of me. It didn’t become easy exactly, but it did become — just a little bit — magic.

IV.

It’s corny, but I guess that’s why I love both creating and reading these scores; it’s ever so slightly magical. Even for those who can’t particularly read music, I think it can add to the appreciation of a composition to see such scores while listening to the music and know that, somehow, when the former is put in front of the right eyes it becomes the latter. Even if the music alone does relatively little for you, surely it’s at least fun to know that it was generated by splashes of color, a spiral or a baroquely-detailed heart.

But for the musically fluent…

Take another close look at the heart-shaped ars subtilior example above. Unless you’re quite familiar with European Renaissance notation, it’s probably difficult to imagine precisely what sounds have been encoded here, and it would remain so even if the score weren’t graphically altered. It should be familiar — after all this is a direct evolutionary antecedent of modern Western notation — but the specifics remain tantalizingly out of reach without further study. The note shapes are just that: shapes. It’s a potent reminder that ALL notation is entirely graphical, even though it’s as hard to see standard modern notation purely visually as it is to look at a sign in your native language and appreciate solely the contours of the familiar characters without their usual meaning.

However, musical notation isn’t simply shapes that convey unrelated concepts as they do in written language. The system is actually brilliantly visual; higher pitches are higher on the staff, longer notes generally take up more space than shorter, simultaneous pitches are stacked together. Yet when we first learned the system it must have been so alluring and strange. With every practice session and rehearsal—with every score read—we rendered it entirely transparent. Each step closer to Parnassus undoubtedly made us better musicians, but it made those beautiful shapes more and more boring.

Both composing and reading non-traditional notation can restore just a hint of that original mystery. One of the greatest things art can provide is the warping of the familiar. It’s wonderful to see and hear new things, but it can be astonishing to see and hear old things anew.

Pat Muchmore is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and founding member of Anti-Social Music in New York City. Some of his music can be heard on their album “Fracture: The Music of Pat Muchmore” and his Web site.