Re: Scores

[Glenn Bach <gbach@xxxxxxxxx>]

> sifting sound particles through a sieve.
>
> that's Xenaxis.  Stockhausen wouldn't need to shift
> particles being as he is pure energy and god and all
> of that.

And now I'm not sure it was Xenakis either.  Maybe Kim might remember who talked about the sieve?  I'm waiting for Curtis Roads' _Microsound_ to hit my
mailbox to see if I can find it there.

When I mentioned the female composer who spoke of an organic model, it was in the Feb 2002 The Wire, where cellist and composer Joelle Leandre talks about
Giacinto Scelsi: ". . . he really learned how to concentrate, how to _listen_.  He was the first (along with Ligeti, perhaps) to focus on the ecorce [outer
surface, bark of a tree, husk, rind] of sound."  (Invisible Jukebox, p22)


> your discussion of scores brings up the potentially
> longwinded debate/discussion regarding the changing
> function of those things with regard to sound (this
> has been happening for like 50 years).  Scores used to
> be, of course, instrunctions for fabrication of pieces
> following specific linguistic rules and cultural
> context.  They function in many different ways now,
> including as pure visual objects.

I believe, and this is the angle I'm working on in my research, is that the traditional score has been sublimated into the sequencing/processing software
window.  With traditional scores, and with some of the experimental notations, there is a relatively open system where the composer creates the work,
publishes the score, then a conductor interprets, and an orchestra/ensemble performs.  Lots of people can have access to the work.

Contemporary "post-digital" work seems to me a closed system (not necessarily a bad thing), in that the composer creates, distributes, and performs the
work, eliminating all the intermediaries. There is no score, other than what happened in the studio, on the computer monitor, and in the head of the
composer.  And the only access people have is to listen.  (Kim's parasites and remix projects in general are a little different, and I'm going to look into
that separately.)

Notation becomes a private act, a byproduct of the creation process.  Elliot Schwartz and Daniel Godfrey talk about this in their book, _Music Since 1945:
Issues,
Materials, and Literature_:  ?From the composer?s point of view, then, notation provides one more important form of communication: communication with
oneself.  It permits an ongoing dialogue between the composer and the work, and also between the composer and a level of deep consciousness activated when
he or she is in the creative mode.? (400)


> Fred Frith has some nice graphic scores which are
> photos of things and actually have rules that go along
> with them as to how to interpret the photos.  Really
> in this case the photos are just metaphors for a
> structural game-idea.  They are nice though because
> they mediate the whole instruction vs pure visual
> metaphor situation

I will look those up.  What were they called?

G.