Inter-Media Interpretation of Notation
posted by 60hz | March 5, 2009
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IcerocketRecently i've been investigating the idea of using notations from other
media as musical performative scores. I'm interested in drawing out the
process involved in "performing" a score like a knitting pattern, or a
recipe, which is usually hidden from the "audience" (the wearer of the
garment, or the diner) and focusing not on the finished result, but on
the steps and sequences that are contained in the end product. Like in
music, often too much focus is applied to the end result, without
regard for the intent and process involved in the manufacture and
production of a piece. In music this is exemplified by the maniacal
devotion to consuming recorded media that pervades the internet age.
People are happy to say that they know a performer's work having only
listened to recordings, and never having seen the music performed live.
Walter Benjamin, in his essay "art in the age of mechanical
reproduction" addresses this point, observing that a recording is not a
faithful reproduction of an musical work. though recording serves as an
excellent record of
a
musical event, the very technology employed to create the recording
filters and alters the experience of the work that the listener has;
even the sound system that the recording is played back on can
drastically alter the experience. The actual music, performed in a
studio most often, is gone for ever at the moment the piece is over. in
many cases, the piece is never actually played all at once (thank you
pop music.)
So, what i aim to do, is to create a series of
works which draws out the process of a an alternate media in a sonic
form, and in performing these scores, to inspire the audience to
reflect on the art of everyday life, and the mundane. more on the
progression in time!
Comments
the role of concrete notation in performance
— Mar 09, 2009
Hey man,
Nice post. It will be interesting to see where your inquiries lead you.
For me, the problems surrounding notation have brought me to understanding recorded media a bit differently. First off, there are lots of time-based media artists who work in "fixed media", where the desired performance is not based on interaction with a dynamic system, but "fixed", so that an ideal performance would be the same on one night as it would be on another night. Many of these artists who might call themselves "composers" or "musicians" distribute their work as a recorded artifact, often described as an "electronic score", to be played alone as a tape-piece or with live instrumental accompaniment.
In fixed formats, the attribution of the term "score" or "notation" to a recorded artifact has ties to muisque concrete, whose name refers to the idea that the musical event is concretely tied to the physical artifact, and not to a formalized abstraction, to which the movement was a response. Indeed, this trickles down into popular music traditions as well, as you note in your essay. However, I think this precedent surfaced long before the invention of multitracking, or even before Edison. The precedent here is the distribution of notation as a primary mechanically reproduced commodity: sheet music. The piano is the ipod of the previous century.
Even in media that is less "fixed", often an essential component of the materials that get distributed to potential realizers of a piece is this recorded artifact, and while that may not stand as the sole representation of the event, it is certainly an important one. An anecdote: last week I was asked to realize a performance of Mark Ballora's "Singularity" for flute and laptop. I agreed, and was given a .zip file containing pdf music scores (with somewhat nontraditional notation for extended flute techniques and section markings for computer state-changes), a pdf diagram of the routing procedure, a few SuperCollider files, and a recording of the piece as performed by Ballora himself, and a flautist who I believe is his wife. I tried running the SC3 code on my machine and, to my dismay, it didn't work. The piece had been written in mid 2006 and the sourcecode used all manner of depricated function calls, not to mention it depended on a MIDI interface. I listened to the recording and followed along the traditional notation to get a sense of the piece. Not only was this helpful for me to practice the piece, but I was able to reverse-engineer the code to get the result intended by the composer. I even ended up writing a little GUI so I wouldn't have to deal with MIDI, that faddish protocol from the '80s. In short, the notation could only be realized because of two of its characteristics: first, its open-sourceness, and second, its recordedness.
So this is not just my critique of you, but also Benjamin, who was writing mostly about the effects of cinema on culture. Although, in this sense he's right, an acousmatic account of an event is not the event itself, nor it is meant to be. However this does not seem to hold its shape in different contexts. Benjamin was certainly not writing about composers trying to get their work realized.
As far as the series you propose to work through, I'm interested to see where you go with it. I am reminded of fluxus when you mention framing the mundane. How will you make the frame apparent in your works? How will the performative act of making soup differ from the private one? How will you notate these pieces? And finally, when you do come up with scores, would you like to trade? I'm making one for you to realize...
JM
