Graphic Score Book

What are these?

Are they sunsets over a valley?

Are they contemplations of man’s role in the universe, and whether or not we as a species have gone too far in its assertion of dominance in it?

Are they a cry of oppression in the silent form, one that its dictators won’t understand, and a longing for freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?   

Or are they just a bunch of squiggly lines on a canvas?

In truth, they are actually musical compositions.

All of these are compositions crafted in what’s called “Graphic Notation”. Graphic Notation is such that is more democratic than its traditional counterpart. It provides the performer a set of vague instructions on how it might want something done based on a series of symbols and expects the performer to fill in the gaps, blurring the line between composer and performer. As I keep saying in these blog posts (seriously, I’m like a parrot here) no two performances are alike, and all that hard work can result in performances like this:

This style of composing was particularly popular among the composers of the New York School (with Morton Feldman being the hipster of the group, writing in grid style before anyone else), taking their inspirations from their fellow artists. But how did they take inspiration? Sure, John Cage’s 4’33” was most directly inspired by a series of white canvases by Robert Rauschenberg, but the three movements are all tacet, not exactly uncommon notations. So where did inspiration strike? What force would compel these composers to write compositions that look more like pieces of art? Well, there is one idea: Abstract Expressionism.

Abstract Expressionism is, in its rawest form, an extreme form of surrealism. It takes the raw emotions of its painter and puts in on canvas, no matter how silly and unusual it may seem. Often, the results look something like this:

Look familiar?

To be fair, this is one of the earliest portions of the New York School, forming shortly after World War II as a way of separating themselves from the Parisian counterparts. Regardless, there is no way that the paintings presented here are not influential on the graphics of at least some of the graphic notation works written over the years. For instance, compare Arshile Gorky’s The Liver in the Cock’s Comb…

...to this piece by Slavek Kwi.

Granted, Kwi is a more recent composer than, say, John Cage, but the influences are obvious. Similar graphics, similar uses of color, similar design. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that the Kwi was clearly made in photoshop, I would call this a truly grand Abstract expressionist piece.

But that’s just one example. Let us now look at a piece from the famous 1920s painter, Wassily Kandinsky: Unbroken Line.

This painting is a clear resemblance of random, uninterrupted chaos scattered about the canvas. What all this means is unclear (and I’m not gonna try to analyze it), but its influence is clear in pieces like this:

And like this:

And, of course, like this:

Of course, not all graphic notation has its roots in this style of artistry (there’s also the I Ching to take into consideration), but it’s obvious that Abstract Expressionism played a significant role in its early stages. It both goes to show just how much the factions of the New York School intermingled with each other and, more important, that inspiration can strike from anywhere.

The Student of the Master

In late 1951, John Cage attended a concert for the New York Philharmonic. On the program that evening was Anton Webern’s Symphony, op. 21, and a Rachmaninoff piece. Cage enjoyed the Webern so much, that upon hearing the audience’s harsh reception to it, Cage left the concert early. In the lobby, he met a man named Morton Feldman. As it turned out, he left early for the exact reason. That evening, the two men struck up a friendship that would last until Feldman’s death. And by means that I am way too lazy to get into right now, they along with Earle Brown, David Tutor, and Christian Wolff, Cage’s pupil, the New York School was born.

The New York School, as it was called mostly because the composers were all in New York at the time, was an arts movement that centered mostly around avant-garde styles of writing. It included a variety of arts factions, including poetry, painting, and dancing. However, they tend to focus mostly on Surrealism as well as Avant-Garde, possibly more so. For this post, we will focus mostly on the music-making part of this proverbial school, as they focus mostly on the Avant-Garde aspect of things (that and frankly they’re easier to comprehend). And of these composers, we will focus on a man who has had perhaps the most contact with and the best understanding of John Cage: his pupil, Christian Wolff.

A Frenchman by birth, he and his family fled to America in 1941 to escape Nazi persecution. There, his family assisted in making English translations of famous European literature.He began his studies with Cage in 1950 and became one of his closest confidants. In fact, it was Wolff who gave Cage the copy of I Ching that would influence Cage’s compositional style for the rest of his life. What the book proclaimed was that music should be “...released from intention, and that the sounds should be allowed to be free.” And Cage was not the only one to feel that way: By the time Cage had moved on from traditional notation, Feldman had already been using graphs:

But I digress.

Wolff was not as into such wild notations as was Feldman, but he did do some experimentation. Case in point, his Trio I, which had only the following pitches, G3, A4, A♭5, and C6, playing at slow and uncomplicated rhythms. Eventually, however, he did start getting into some more experimental notations, resulting in pieces like this:

This is an excerpt to the score of one of Wolff’s most famous works, For 1, 2, or 3 People. As you can see, though some minute traces of tradition are present, for the whole the notation is incredibly modernist and looks more like a piece of art than a composition (More on that on a later date.) But there is still one notable piece that should get special mention: the Exercises.

Now, to be clear, the Exercises are a series of pieces that are still being written to this day. Of these, Numbers 1-14 are meant to be played as a group and each subsequent one on their own. Regardless, though, they are still a fine example of performer control, as they have to decide how to take this:

And make it sound like this:

To be fair, I don’t have any other parts of the score, so I had to take the word of a Thom Jurek review from Allmusic. He says that there are a vast number of ways to interpret the piece, and not just because there’s no prescribed instrumentation, either. “Oftentimes the notation will be written on a single stave and can be played in either bass or treble clef...” and “Within octaves, transpositions of all kinds are allowed -- even when two instruments are scored to be playing together...” are two other features of these compositions. This gave the performers unprecedented control over how to perform the piece. Yet all the control the players are given also what makes this series so challenging. The players have to work as a team in order to perform this music well. And it all goes back to the notation.

The reason Christian Wolff had such a good relationship with John Cage was because of their mutual understanding of each other. They respected their current ideologies and learned new techniques from one another. And that, in a way, is what the American School did for Music: introducing other ways for music to be notations. Of course, this was still before the time where some compositions looked like they more belonged in an art collection than on a music stand. But that’s another matter entirely.

John Cage and Electronics

Let’s talk about John Cage some more.

In addition to being one of the most famous modernist composers of his time, he was also a promoter of technology and electronic music. He was doing research on electronic music before the technology finally caught up with him during the late 60s. This subject apparently caught his attention because John Cage always believed in a disconnect between the audience and the music they’re hearing. In a diary entry about audiences (which to be fair, is more about his philosophy on nature as music), Cage said that “What we need is a computer that isn't labor-saving but which increases the work for us to do, that puns...as well as Joyce revealing bridges...where we thought there wasn't any, turns us...not ‘on’ but into artists”. In other words, Cage’s philosophy on electronic music is that we as an audience must search really hard to find and cohesive meaning in it. And that’s exactly what Cage set out to do.

Now, to be clear, my thoughts this post aren't as long for this subject as they may be in subjects past. That’s mostly because there’s only one piece given to us that really fits the mechanized subject seen here. The other piece, One5, feels more like a study on the overtone series than anything else. It’d be pointless to talk about that work because doing so would be diverging too much from the original topic. That, and I had to catch up on some other work this week. I’m only human!

One need only to take a passing listen to Cage’s Music of Changes (Book 1 in this case) to understand that this piece isn't like other pieces for solo piano. That’s mostly because it’s a complete mess from start to finish!

Much like Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, it too is a mishmash of everything but the kitch-

You know what, I already used that joke, let’s just move on.

Unlike Studies for Player Piano, however, there’s no technological advancement. It’s simply a player sitting at a piano, pounding out the keys in a seemingly random order as though it was a actual computer.

And I think that may have been the intent for this piece. For a man as interested in technology as he was, John Cage must’ve been familiar with those old IBM-type computers that were the size of refrigerators.

Especially those which double as powerful explosive devices.

And there are models that blink, if they don’t “sound”, in seemingly random orders at seemingly random frequencies. Take the old IBM System/360 for instance:

I am not certain whether or not Cage was familiar with this specific type of machine, but it still contains the same random pattern so anything is possible.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about that piece, but that was a piece written for piano. In order to get a better understanding about Cage’s interest in electronic music is to listen to some actual electronic music he composed. For the sake of example, I’ll be focusing on Radio Music:

This piece is fascinating. In essence, it is a composition for three radios: its performers tune to random stations, most of the time ending up on static, before settling on something serine. This particular performance sounds like machinery on top of Spanish Soap-Operas. It distinctively does sound like a conversation between two different computers, both working for the same means.

Granted, much like 4’33”, no two performances are ever alike; it changes with the musical taste of the Mainstream public. But that’s what makes it so unique. More importantly, though, that’s what makes it so mechanical. The static does give the piece a mechanical sorority, and also a hypnotic one. It doesn’t so much emote anything (though the same is true with all computer music) as it does invite: invite the listener back to days gone by, days where the only music source was a radio.

But maybe I’m looking too deeply into this. Still, that may be what John Cage wanted. He invited us (in my mind, at least) to pay attention to the music being presented to us, to listen beyond what we hear. And who knows: The symphony of a thousand hours begins with a single binary number.

How to be a Modernist Composer in 4 Easy Steps

In the turn of the century, there were a group of men called the American Five. They composed pieces outside the norm, that would help shape an original, distinct American style of classical music. Who knows where we’d be without them.

But, all composers come and go as they do. And they typically carry on the work their predecessors leave behind. For the American Five, these were the Modernist composers.

Much like the American Five before them, the modernist composers of the 1950s were also producing compositions unlike anything America had either seen or was prepared for. Unlike, the American Five, however, they took that experimentation much farther than the former group, creating pieces that are best described as Organized Chaos.

No, not THAT type of Organized Chaos.

Ah, that’s better.

Whether they come from John Cage, John Cowell, or any old John who believed in the style, the pieces usually sounded like a Sturm und Drang, but with more “Sturm” and less “Drang”. But like most compositions, there’s a method to this madness: a method Milton Babbitt described in his thesis “Who Cares if you Listen”.

He describes the following four key features of “new music”:

1. There is an increased tonal vocabulary (in others words, increased atonal elements) compared to styles past.

2. An in turn increased number of functions (all related to the following five dimensions: pitch-class, register, dynamic, duration, and timbre) associated with the musical components being presented.

3. There is a greater sense of autonomy and contextuality in these types of pieces then there is in pieces past; they don’t so much share a set of characteristics so much as there are a set catered specifically to that piece.

And 4. Though it should be new and exhilarating, it should not stray too far from tradition, for to not honor the people who helped your music get to where it is now will isolate the listener (not that the compositions didn’t end up isolating listeners anyway, but that’s a whole other matter completely).

To boil the above guidelines into one sentence, what Babbitt’s saying is this: Move forward but Don’t Forget where you came from. It’s bad for you and bad for your audience. And there’s no shame in taking something away from a seasoned composer. Babbitt himself did this with one composer in particular, one that has influenced him and countless other composers like him: Anton Schoenberg.

Herr Schoenberg came to America in 1941 to escape Nazi persecution. It was not because he was a Jew, but because his style of composing was frowned upon in Nazi Germany. (incidentally, Kurt Weill left for that exact reason, but that's neither here nor there). And that style of composing:

Why, twelve-tone serialism, of course (17:59).

Twelve-tone technique, of course, is one that ensures that all twelve tones in the chromatic scale are heard, without any one tone being emphasized. The music thus promotes both equality and atonality at an equal level. And when he came to America where his music was (...somewhat) more accepted, He found composers willing to give Schoenberg’s idea a try. Composers like Aaron Copland, William Schuman, and Royal Harris found uses of Twelve-Tone Serialism in their catalogs. Even Leonard Bernstein crafted a cleverly-hidden Row in the Fugue section of “Cool” from West Side Story.

But there is another man who would also experiment with this idea of Twelve-Tone serialism, a man who, in his address at a Schoenberg conference, Claudio Spies would call out by name: Milton Babbitt.

He would not only embrace Schoenberg’s idea of the Twelve-Tone Row, but would also expand on and improve it.

Take his Composition for Four Instruments, for example.

One need only take a pacing glance at the score to see the atonal and twelve-tonal influences. Below is a chart detailing the pitch arrays found in this piece.

As one can hear in the beginning, this piece does not follow any of the prescribed sets exactly. And that’s part of what sets Babbitt apart from Schoenberg: the amount of variation and transformation found within this composition. Sure, Schoenberg experimented with Retrograde, Inversion, and Retrogrades of Inversions, but there are literally billions of combination possibilities with Twelve-tone music, and Babbitt clearly recognized that.

So, to recapitulate, Experimentation is always good for music. All things have to evolve to fit their environment in order to achieve long-term survival, and music is no exception. That being said, though, it’s equally important to respect and build off of the lessons of the past. The masters of days gone by are masters for a reason, and many of them were experimentalists in their days. Learning from their past and what made their compositions so special is the difference between a composer and a master.