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Open Door - One of the principal problems of a text dealing with graphical musical scores is the absence of any definable terminology. The relevant literature mentions synonyms such as visual score, visual music, experimental “New music” notation, and graphic notation; some of these do not seem genuine synonyms and in some cases they indeed are not. This applies equally to German (graphische Musik, visuelle Musik, graphische Partituren) and Slovak terminology (vizuálna partitúra, grafická hudba, hudobná grafika, grafická notácia, vizuálna notácia). The effort to clarify matters has led me, following Milan Adamčiak, to a different typology of the subject of our interest; we have decided to term it comprehensively, “visual scores”.
Since a traditional musical score by itself is visual, this creates redundancy and paradox. The effort to specify further has led us to extend the characterization of scores that differ from conventional ones. We shall mention five classes of visual scores; as the first, let us introduce visualized scores in more detail as we shall not be dealing with them later on.
Attempts to make the codified European notation system resemble graphic art may already be found around the year 1400 in the famed manneristic compositions by B. Cordier (scores organized in the shape of a circle or a heart). Later, during the transition between the 16th and the 17th centuries, among the multitude of polyphonic compositions that depart from the linearity of musical notation can be found scores drawn in the shapes of circles, a labyrinth, a tree, or a chessboard. Visually attractive have become manuscripts and sketches of composers that revealed a scriptural and gestural expressivity of the author (such as those of Couperin and Bach, later Beethoven, Janáček, and Satie). Scores may change their formats, utilizing two or many various colours (Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen), or they may be found on a special foil (John Cage). Contemporary music scores feature geometric and gestural elements, specific notographic signs as well as general symbols, numerical, alphabetic, graphic and verbal means of expression. The spectrum of recordings of proceedings, processes, actions, gestures, or movements towards the end of the 1960s led to a “self–reflexion” of musical scores as a visual phenomenon on the boundaries between media (“intermedia”). In parallel with the origin of analytical painting, system painting, and minimal art, similar tendencies arise in the creation of scores. Michael Vetter, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Bogusław Schäffer and others analyze the process of composing and performance of music, and create “meta–scores” – recordings for the “composition” of music, analyses of the proceedings of their own activity. Scores then reflect the newly awakened interest in the subject matter, often with a strong critical, ironic or even sarcastic undertone (Mauricio Kagel). In the work of a number of authors of scores may be observed a concentration on the variants of details and their poeticization (B. Danon, Giuseppe Chiari – the 1970s). Michael Vetter in his scores records movements of the hand, while Milan Grygar focuses on recording the varying shape of a line in space.
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Musical scores as graphics are represented by authors of musical graphics and graphical music such as Russolo, Klee, and Kandinsky; later Cage, Feldman, Brown, Wolf, Haubenstock, Logothetis, Cardew, Crumb, Braxton, Ligety, Karkoschka, Bussoti, Schnabel, and Adamčiak. Intermedia scores are recordings of colour music (Skryabin, Baranoff-Rossiné, Willfred, Laszló), action (Rauschenberg), dance (Cunningham), performance (Kaprow, Kantor), concepts and modifications of traditional scores as implemented by graphic artists. Another chapter are scores of speech and writing as found in optophonic poems and in the work of futurists, French lettrists, and authors like Hausman, Schwitters, Ball, Tzara, Chlebnikov, Lemaitre, Sabatier, and Vetter. The last group are meta-scores, pseudo-scores, and quasi-scores, recordings of the sequence and structure of processes, events, gestures, and movements, but also quotations of the basic characteristics of traditional and experimental scores; not excluding musical graphics and graphical music. At this point it must already be obvious that even a typological approach like this cannot be exhaustive, though it may succeed in introducing new perspectives to view the subject of visual scores. It is therefore understandable that my main focus have been the more conventional approaches towards the creation of graphic scores.
Pic.1: John Cage: Fontana Mix, 1958
Pic.2: Luigi Russolo: Prebudiť mesto, kompozícia pre intonarumori, 1916
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