I started learning piano pretty late ... 13 years old and my favourite
thing to do was sight-read Debussy and Beethoven, put on the metronome
and play Mozart with a Salsa rhythm. The language of music, communicated
through dotted notes and symbols, became a playground. When I was
studying music and learning about Graphic Notation, the way composers
such as Earle Brown, Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen and
John Cage reorganised this system of notation fascinated me. The music
score became a tool that could be personalised, played with and
improvised. The sound quality and tone of instruments (timbre) became
the focus rather than the harmony of the music. It was love at first
sight!
In Graphic Notation there isn't any notated harmony or
rhythm and an ensemble's director and performers can choose their
instruments or sounds. You are literally playing pictures. The number of
players can vary widely, from a quartet of Classical instruments to
performances by Indie bands such as Sonic Youth. Below you can listen to
their performance of the graphic music piece Edges by Christian Wolff (1964) from the album
SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century (1999)
.
In the 1960's the 'downtown' music scene of New York nurtured
composers such as Elliott Carter, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Cornelius
Cardew who all embraced this new form of notation and approach to
music. This music scene didn't confine itself to the
traditional ensembles, performance traditions, or the musical rhetoric
of European
classical music. They welcomed the experimental, the vernacular, pop culture influences, simplicity and noise! By realising a new visual vocabulary outside the realm of
traditional music they unearthed a new freedom of expression and opened up
different ways to communicate the beauty of sound. For me, this is the perfect
union of art and sound.
Other exponents of Graphic Notation:
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki, Mauricio
Kagel, Cathy Berberian, Brian Eno, Herbert Brün, Aphex Twin, and Iannis
Xenakis.