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Sources and Wellsprings - The term score originates in the latter half of the 16th century and denotes a graphical record (in manuscript or print) of a musical composition by means of notation. After acquainting oneself with the code of such a record, the traditional musical score enables one to decipher the basic intentions of the author and the composer’s conception along with the musical structure of the composition. In a broader sense, a score is a technical aid to the sound realization of a musical work. Today the term score is used not only in music but also in other, mainly intermedia areas of artistic communication, and denotes a notation produced by the author in any scriptural, graphic, painted or printed form. Therefore a score may be the notation of a dance, a movement performance, light-kinetic (and any other kinds of) performances, phonic poetry, audiovisual creations, multimedia projects, actions, happenings, events, or live installations. As a result of the development of artistic thought mainly in the 20th century, scores have become diversified in innumerable ways depending on an author’s conception and on the usage of the form of the notation to create an authentic work or semiotic text; thanks to their visual nature and aspects of content and meaning, scores have now found their permanent place as a variety of graphic art.
The outset of the 20th century brings new approaches to the notation system as first devised in 1000 AD by Guido of Arezzo. The standard and traditional system of notation of musical parameters (height, length, intensity of tone, melodiousness) became an obstacle whenever it was necessary to record other qualities of sound–creating proceedings (process of the origin of sounds, gesture, action, space, light, colour, sonority, movement). From among the first creators of visual music, let us mention Erik Satie (1866–1925) who in 1914 wrote A Composition In the Shape of a Light-Bulb or in the shape of waves (Le Bain de mer). In the same time period, the Italian futuristic painter Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) created his own methods of notation for noise–producing instruments from the rumori series constructed by himself (L´Arte dei rumori, 1913). After the publishing of Russolo’s manifesto Erratum musical, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) composed a piece with the same title, utilizing the element of chance in the creation of the score. Filipp Tommas Marinetti (1876–1944) in his Liberated Words (1914) dissolved the linearity of a page of text, creating space for inarticulate “reading” analogous to the examination of a cubistic or futuristic painting. The incorporation of speech and noise into paintings in the form of onomatopoeic texts and a distinct font was employed by other futurists, Carlo Carr? and Gino Severini, while F. Cangiullo created scores of “poetry in notes”. Within the field of creativity of futurists and dadaists at the beginning of the 20th century were creations utilizing human voice, its phonic and phonetic dispositions, possibilities of varying articulation of the spoken word, or the simultaneity of several voices. In connection with this interest, the graphical recording of optophonetic poems and their presentations was formed (by Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, and Tristan Tzara among others). This is the origin of the poem as a visual score of its delivery, exemplified by Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate. The leaders in the field of notation of intermedia creations produced in the 20th century were the efforts made in the notation of dance and music of lights. The recordings of dance became best–known in Laban’s notation (1920s); it presupposes a basic premise of a score of simultaneous and successive activities, for which in the course of centuries a system of graphemes for various movements of parts of the human body was developing and transforming, resulting in a visually impressive scriptural and graphic notation system that focuses on the rhythm and tempo of proceedings. Analogous parameters play a dominant role in the attempts made by Alexander Skryabin to create music of (colour) lights; in his score for the symphony Prometheus (1910), Skryabin created a special part for “luchi” (coloured light). Simultaneously, projects in music of lights were developed by Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Thomas Willfred, Alexander Laszló, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, and last not least Zdenìk Pešánek. Scores of lighted or coloured music may in their modifications be met whenever something is created for the electronic media; they signify an effort to synchronize proceedings, bring about equivalence between various media. Scores here attain the form of a technical notation of flow charts for diverse media activities; their visual values are idiosyncratic. A noteworthy innovation were the notations of actions and concepts whose origin may be traced back to the mid–1950s when John Cage cooperated with Merce Cunningham’s dance ensemble and with the graphic artist Robert Rauschenberg.
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Towards the end of the 1940s, a group of composers in New York – John Cage (1912–92), Morton Feldman (1926–87), Earle Brown (1926), and Chris Wolff (1934) – created the genre of visual scores. John Cage, in his focus to capture and record indeterminism in the musical process, finds enormous possibilities of variability of notations and their distribution in time and space. Chris Wolff (1934) schematizes inter–relations and connections; Morton Feldman concentrates proceedings into numerical flowcharts; and in 1952, Earle Brown discloses the variability and fungibility of the time–and–space orientation of notation in creating first musical graphics with an approximative sequence. In seminars first organized in the mid–1950s, John Cage acquainted his pupils with visual scores (New School for Social Research); many of the students later became leaders of the Fluxus movement. In 1959 at the instigation of Roman Haubenstock–Ramati (1919), the first international exhibition of scores titled Musikalische Graphik took place during the festival of New Music in Donaueschingen. On the one hand, artists create scores using a rich palette of graphic means translatable into music (graphic music); its protagonists in European music were Roman Haubenstock–Ramati, A. Logothetis (1921), C. Cardew (1936–1981), Earle Brown, and Georg Crumb (1929). On the other hand, the art of musical graphics crystallizes: these are visual notations that do not ever expect to be realized in sound; they manifest themselves directly to the spectators (readers) without providing them with any key to decipher the constituent graphemes, counting on an immediate musical experience nourished by the visual impulse and sustained by synthetic emotions. A representative work of this type of scores is a book of notograms, graphemes and drawings, MO-NO, Music For Reading (1969) by Dieter Schnebel. In free jazz music, graphic scores have been employed since the 1970s by Anthony Braxton (1945).
Cage’s interest in the incorporation of non–musical activities (noises of the environment, gesture, action, movement) and in accidental processes, indeterminism, led not merely to the enrichment of scores with new parameters and their unconventional notation, but also to creations that outgrew conventional interpretational (concert) realizations of music. The rise of happenings, music theatre or instrumental theatre, action, events, and performances, necessitated the forming of wholly new ways of notation and documentation. Beside pre-scriptive scores there are now post-scriptive scores: these may be seen as reconstructing the sequence of events in combination with documentation, verbal and graphical description of the environment and space where certain activities occur. Such scores are the only materialization of a work that is understood as a unique and irreplaceable process reflecting the work’s concept, openness, and non-definitiveness. The first scores of happenings and action in the early 1960s had the form of a script, a verbal and graphic montage or mix (Allan Kaprow, Tadeus Kantor, Karlheinz Stockhausen); others merely postulate overall contours of proceedings and of the environment in the shape of a plan, drawing, picture, or collage (Wolf Vostell [1932], J. J. Lebel, Milan Knížák [1940]). Graphic scores in the work of the Wiener Gruppe (1954–60) are represented by the radical Gerhard Rühm (1930). Perhaps the most pervasive influence on the development of scores was exerted after 1962 by the FLUXUS movement - Ben Patterson (1934), George Brecht (1926), Dick Higgins (1938), Giuseppe Chiari (1926), J. MacLow (1933), Nam June Paik (1932), and La Monte Young (1935) with their “Neo-Dadaistic” conceptions. Verbal scores are created in the form of an elementary or global instruction (for a real or potential interpret). The “subject” of a score can now be any object, space, environment, action of the percipients, situation, or gesture; the score, in evoking or accenting such factors, or in suggesting their meaning, becomes the deliberate bearer of the author’s concept, open to any real (factual, concrete) or potential (imaginary, conceptual, fictitious, or virtual) “realizations”. In this sense, the score has become one of the modi vivendi of an old-time premise of John Cage’s, who used to claim that what mattered was material, not the idea. Today’s composers and visual artists have the possibility, with the help of computer programs, to transform any visualization (determined by software) into sound form and thus realize old concepts in new ways. Some 3D software applications use animated graphics as the score in the creation of a musical composition, as presented by Iwai Toshio (1962) during Ars Electronica 1997; on Toshio’s computer screen could be observed an interactive and dynamic movement of animated geometric shapes on an animated keyboard, while a virtual piano visible on the same screen was producing the corresponding music.
Obr.1 - Philip Corner: Solo music and more, 1962
Obr.2 - Jackson Mac Low: Musicword for Phil Niblock, 1977 - 78
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