Thoughts on Graphic Scores 1

In preparation for a lecture as part of an upcoming course, I’ve been reviewing a number of interesting graphical scores to refresh not only my visual recollection of them, but also to reassess, after years of atrophy (near exclusive engagement with other symbols), how the graphical representation of sound can be systematically construed as a series of instructions, inferences, and affordances directed toward the performer; amongst the parameters of pitch (frequency), intensity, and duration, instructions to initiate, alter timbres, and end the performance are, to varying degrees, present in many of the scores. I’ve primarily been pulling graphic scores and graphic score excerpts from John Cage’s Notations, and while the examination of these scores is no longer enough to be exhaustive (since the book’s first publication), it gives me, as a score reader and interpreter, a diverse and fair scope of the practice of graphical score notation.

What jumps out, given the wide range of images and their mappings to sound-instructions close-at-hand to practiced musicians, is the extent to which the composer indicates specificities within the range of each, normally interpreted, musical domain (representing changes, ∆F ((frequency)), ∆G ((intensity)), ∆D ((duration)), and other, seemingly less exploited or semiotically submerged domains.

Naturally, many practicing musicians in the Western tradition have become used to seeing the typical ranges of appropriate notation, as input, and then supplying a contextually informed (within ranges of predictability) output according to conventional meanings and signs surrounding the notation. The vagaries, with variable investment in aleatoric and stochastic procedures, are affordances. At what level are the musicians participants in the generation and development in the sound relative to the imaginings of the composer? I’m thinking here of improvisational seeding scores wherein the sound actually generated may differ greatly from the sound heard in the composer’s mind - this too is along another axis of variability when considering the “intentions” of the written, drawn, compiled, or procedurally generated score.

(There is too, a kind of ethic in the presentation of this music with highly variable (highly volatile) symbols for interpretation: is it antiquated to suggest that a recommitment to the score, possible intentions or non-intentions of the composer manifested should be renewed continuously in performance? Even if the composer’s intention is flippant, defiant, individualistic in an ironic way? )

Within the specificity or non-specificity, more domains of possibility arise - beyond the typical Western scope of pitch, velocity, duration, we must consider parameters particular to the work at hand; intention or non-intention, levity, ironic distance, parody, amongst others. I find that the generation of a music theory regarding these scores may be further preoccupied with the hermeneutic vagaries of the score rather than the ∆F ∆G ∆D triad and its background parameter of formal convention.

It’s the specificity or non-specificity that gets to me - I ask myself what the most specific score would appear as? What would the most non-specific score appear as?

I’m hoping to continue this exploration in future posts with examples and analysis (of a sort).

Thanks for reading! I’d love it if you had comments or thoughts to leave-

-Charlie Ruth