Piano

Tudor switched from the organ to the piano in his late teens. His approach to the new instrument, whose nature he regarded as percussion, centered on harnessing its mechanism of escapement, which resulted in the control of all parameters as a function of precise timing of attack and release. This proved especially well-suited to the pointillistic works being written by composers on both sides of the Atlantic. But close examination reveals that the relationship between Tudor and the composers around him, which gave birth to new methods of chance operations, indeterminacy, or graphic scores, was actually led by the pianist’s exploration of his instrument, many times at the bewilderment of others as to what captivated his attention. At the core of Tudor’s singular realizations was a focus on the physical bias of the score given to him, which he referred to as “material.” As the degree of indeterminacy in the composer’s materials increased throughout the 1950s, Tudor would more and more shift his attention to another kind of material involved in the realization of music: the physical nature of instruments, including his own self, which composers had already begun regarding as such.

Mapping Sound

Each playthrough of Ed Key and David Kanaga's Proteus (2013) presents players with a new, randomly generated island to explore. This unstructured exploration is accompanied by a procedurally generated ambient soundtrack that incorporates both harmonic textures and melodic motives, and abstract musical representations of environmental sounds. In the absence of clearly defined goals—except to progress through four distinct “seasons” of the game—the player's relationship to the soundtrack becomes a core gameplay element, and a playthrough of Proteus becomes, among other things, a kind of improvised performance art. Viewed from this perspective, Proteus's combination of free exploration and chance strongly evokes ideas from mid-twentieth-century musical modernism, including the graphic scores of Cardew and Cage and the “mobile form” works of Stockhausen and Ligeti. Proteus further complicates analysis by concealing the mechanisms that produce particular musical fragments and by eliding the roles of listener and player/performer. This article examines the tensions inherent in the complementary actions of playing/performing Proteus and listening to/analyzing it, and argues that the game challenges the distinctions between creator, performer, and observer by vividly embodying the most deeply ingrained metaphors of music analysis.

Musicografie van architectuur: Muziek ontwerpen, de stad horen / Musicography of Architecture: Designing Music, Hearing the City

Murat Ali Cengiz is zowel architect als jazzpianist en- componist. In dit artikel traceert hij de artistieke ontwikkeling van architecturaal ontwerp tot grafische partituren als basis voor jazzimprovisatie. Cengiz beschrijft zijn reis tussen de disciplines en belicht concepten zoals vormgrammatica, tijdlijnen versus tijd en grafische notatie. Zo ontwikkelt hij een benadering om architecturale structuren van de stad te vertalen naar grafische improvisatiescores. Murat Ali Cengiz is an architect as well as a jazz pianist and composer. In this article he traces the artistic development of architectural designs into graphic scores that form the basis for jazz improvisation. Cengiz describes his journey between the disciplines and illuminates concepts such as the grammar of form, timelines versus time and graphic notation. In this way he develops an approach for translating the architectural structures of the city into scores for graphic improvisation.

Canavangard, Udo Kasemets'sTrigon, and Marshall McLuhan: Graphic Notation in the Electronic Age

Composer Udo Kasemets (1919–2014) emigrated to Canada in 1951 from Estonia following the Second World War, and during the 1960s undertook a number of initiatives to mobilize experimental music in Toronto. This article investigates Canavangard, Kasemets's publication series of graphic scores which appeared between 1967 and 1970. Influenced by Marshall McLuhan's spatial theory of media, Kasemets saw the transformative potential of non-standard notational practices to recalibrate the relationships between composer, performer, and listener. Kasemets's 1963 compositionTrigon, which was frequently performed by his ensemble during the decade, illuminates the connections between McLuhan and experimental music. In my analysis of the work, I argue thatTrigonmanifestly puts into performance many of the rhetorical strategies used by McLuhan to describe the immersive, intersensory environments of post-typographic media ecologies. Kasemets believed that abandoning standard notation would have extraordinary ramifications for musical practice going forward in the twentieth century, similar to how McLuhan saw the messianic power of electronic media to destabilize the typographic universe. Canavangard, as much more than a short-lived publication series of graphic scores, maps the convergences of music, culture, and technology in post-war Canada.

Photography: My New Score

The aim of this research is to demonstrate how photography is used as a creative tool in my compositional process. Purpose-built pictures are created solely with the goal of acting as musical scores, called graphic scores, from which performers improvise. This paves a way for me, the composer, to communicate my compositional ideas to the performers, resulting in new soundscapes and original artworks, without the restrictive barriers placed upon me, the composer, by convention. As an artist, the objective is to capture unique moments in time, where images are taken naturally or by manipulating the camera in a variety of predetermined ways. This idea could work with any picture, but for me, it is the innate musical language that I have developed over the years of my conventional musical training, that leads me to the precise construction of these new compositions. Initially, I was inspired by the writings of John ...

Circular Graphic Scores: Between Time and Space

<p>Situadas entre categorías artísticas, las partituras gráficas hacen uso de elementos del lenguaje visual para representar los sonidos. Desde el origen de la notación gráfica a mediados del siglo XX, las partituras gráficas circulares ocupan un importante lugar entre las creaciones de los compositores. Pese a ello, existe una falta de estudios específicos sobre el tema. El presente artículo pretende aportar claves para la comprensión de las partituras gráficas circulares, así como ofrecer elementos conceptuales que ayuden a entender “cómo suena el círculo”. A través de un estudio comparativo entre la forma gráfica circular y su interpretación musical en algunas de las obras circulares más relevantes de las últimas décadas, se ha comprobado que, frecuentemente, la notación circular corresponde a estructuras musicales de carácter cíclico y repetitivo. Por otra parte, las partituras circulares permiten incorporar elementos de apertura en la interpretación, tales como la duración de la obra, la elección del sentido de lectura o del punto de comienzo. Las partituras gráficas circulares favorecen el análisis de la estructura musical de la pieza y aportan flexibilidad a la interpretación. Además, en ellas se hace evidente el carácter espacial, y no sólo temporal, de la música.</p>