-
DaviD Gutkin
Notation Games: On Autonomy and Play in Avant-Garde Musical
Scores
Introduction
In his 1938 study of the ludic principle, Homo Ludens, historian
Johann Huizinga set play apart from daily life, the ordinary world,
and the real itself.1 Three decades later, in Les jeux et les
hommes, sociologist Ro-ger Caillois reinscribed the opposition
between the ludic and the everyday, going so far as to write that
play and ordinary life are constantly and uni-versally antagonistic
to each other2. The characteristics ascribed to the notion of play
in these two foundational texts of ludic studies bear a notable
resemblance to post-Enlightenment claims about the autonomy of art,
and indeed Huizinga borrowed Kants terminology from the Critique of
Judgment in describing the disinterestedness3 of play. Moreover, a
par-ticular vexation in the conception of autonomy advanced by
these scholars of play might be likewise discerned in
contemporaneous philosophies of art: in both midcentury ludic and
aesthetic theory, autonomy tended to be dialectically enmeshed with
its opposite. Huizinga and Caillois interpreted play as a dynamic
force that shapes the very world that it is said to suspend.
Huizinga, for example, noted that his study is not on the play
element in culture but on the play element of culture.4 Likewise,
Caillois wrote that he had not simply attempted a sociology of
games but had laid the found-ations for a sociology derived from
games.5 For both writers, plays socio-cultural character and power
is wedded to its unsullied separation from
1 Huizinga, Johan: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in
Culture, Boston 1955, p. 7-9, 19, Chapter 1 passim.
2 Caillois, Roger: Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash,
Urbana/Chicago 2001 [1961], p. 63.
3 Huizinga 1955, p. 7. 4 No page number (Foreword). Huizinga
writes, For many years the conviction has
grown upon me that civilization arises and unfolds in and as
play. Traces of such an opinion are to be found in my writings ever
since 1903. I took it as the theme for my annual address as Rector
of Leyden University in 1933, and afterwards for my lectures in
Zrich, Vienna, and London, in the last instance under the title:
The Play Element of Culture. Each time my hosts wanted to correct
it to in Culture, and each time I protested and clung to the
genitive, because it was not my object to define the place of play
among all the other manifestations of culture, but rather to
ascertain how far culture itself bears the character of play.
Nevertheless, Huizingas English-language translator chose to write
in culture for the title.
5 Caillois 2001, p. 58.
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168 DaviD Gutkin 169notation Games
art was already premised on a philosophy of play.9 However,
rather than ad-ducing the many points of historical confluence
between play and art, and probing the matter of priority and
influence enterprises far beyond the scope of this essay in what
follows I explore a delimited field of the ludic-aesthetic
intersection that falls at a late stage in the modernist investment
in autonomy: namely, as found in mid-twentieth-century
music-notational practice. In particular, I interpret musical
notation as a privileged form of mediation between two seemingly
opposed midcentury artistic tendencies: on the one hand, an impetus
toward the intensified autonomization of art, and on the other
hand, the anti-aesthetic embrace of everyday life. I seek to show
how, over the course of about two decades, a network of avant-garde
composers grappled with these competing (anti-)aesthetic visions.
We will see that for composers such as Pierre Boulez, Iannis
Xenakis, John Cage, and Cornelius Cardew (and for their
commentators), play and game function as recurring tropes in the
attempt to stake out a position on the continuum of autonomy.
In an accompanying appendix I include two examples of what I
call listening exercises aural-visual analyses that play on themes
introduced in the body of this article. One centers on Boulezs
Structures Ia and the other on Earle Browns December 1952.
I From the Closed Score to Open-Ended Play
During the early 1950s, numerous young composers of the postwar
avant-garde in Europe and the United States employed serial
principles derived from Arnold Schoenbergs twelve-tone technique
with the aim of genera-ting cohesive, autonomous musical forms.
Many of these same composers wrote scores (in Western staff
notation) of such detail that they left little room for
interpretation and seemed to call for machine-like
performers.10
9 For example, the play drive [Spieltrieb] was central to
Friedrich Schillers concep-tion of art as expounded in his Letters
on the Aesthetic Education of Man. And before Schiller, Kant could
write of arts purposiveness without purpose in part because he
posited that art was purposive only in play. See Guillory, John:
Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation,
Chicago/London 1995, p. 318. For his part, Huizinga describes the
constitutive role of play for the civilizing process in general,
and devotes a chapter to the relationship between play-forms in
art, and another chapter to play in poetry.
10 Of this period, Cornelius Cardew writes: The indeterminacies
of traditional notation became to such an extent accepted that it
was forgotten that they existed, and of what sort they were. The
results of this can be seen in much of the pointillist music of the
50s (Boulez, Berio, Goeyvaerts, Pousseur, Stockhausen, [Herman] Van
San, etc.). The music seemed to exclude all possibility of
interpretation in any real sense; the utmost differentiation,
refinement and exactitude were demanded of the players. Cardew,
Cornelius: Notation Interpretation, Etc., in: Tempo, no. 58, summer
1961, p. 22.
the instrumental obligations of life, a paradox of autonomy that
Theodor Adorno never ceased pointing to in his writings on
aesthetics. To take but one of his many formulations of the
principle, in Aesthetic Theory Adorno wrote that art becomes social
by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as
autonomous art.6
But what is really intended by the rhetoric of autonomy? What,
pre-cisely, are we said to be gaining autonomy from in play or in
art? Some-times it is a question of autonomy from use value, other
times from the marketplace, society, politics, subjectivity,
history, or everyday life.7 The matter becomes additionally opaque
if we grant that all these concepts are less than self-evident
even, or perhaps especially, everyday life. (As Si-tuationist
raconteur Guy Debord memorably commented in 1961: The very
existence of everyday life has been disputed from its very
inception.8) More troublesome yet in these modernist discourses is
the dialectical pi-vot between the autonomous and its
social-quotidian-worldly counterpart (however that is designated).
The process by which those play activities and mentalities bounded
by Huizingas magic circle become the prin-ciples of culture, or by
which Adornos autonomous art becomes social remain murky despite
these authors sustained efforts at its elucidation. I believe this
dialectic of autonomy continues to comprise one of the major
theoretical problems that must be elaborated in comprehending and
his-toricizing the modernist project. The present essay is intended
as a step in this direction.
As an opening gambit, I want to suggest that since play and art
seem to function as twin paradigms within the rhetoric of autonomy,
we should more closely inspect this very doubling. Although I
observed that twen-tieth-century ludic theory picked up on
Enlightenment aesthetics, we could also show that the late
eighteenth-centurys disinterested conception of
6 Adorno, Theodor W.: Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis, MN 1998, p. 225. The complement to this
statement would be that the idea of auto-nomous art only came about
in tandem with arts commodification.
7 In a recent study of the concept of autonomy in modernist
literature and criticism, Andrew Goldstone asks what modernist
writers, in particular times and places, most urgently seek
autonomy from. He lays out four basic possibilitiesof
ever-mo-re-extensive claims for literary autonomy: elevating the
cultivation of aesthetic form over mimetic realism; distinguishing
the autonomous artistic work from the less inde-pendent artist who
makes it; rejecting any political or communal affiliation for
artist and artistic practice alike; or, finally, disavowing
reference to reality altogether. The books four central chapters
are correspondingly titled Autonomy from Labor, Au-tonomy from the
Person, Expatriation as Autonomy, and Literature without Ex-ternal
Reference. Goldstone, Andrew: Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from
Wilde to de Man, New York 2013, p. 4.
8 Debord, Guy: Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday
Life, in: Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken
Knabb, Berkeley, CA 2007, p. 90. Origi-nally published in
Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961).
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170 DaviD Gutkin 171notation Games
ference. When the young Boulez titled his 1952 polemic
Schoenberg is Dead, he was not simply reporting the news.
Schoenberg, Boulez charged, did not advance twelve-tone composition
to its logical conclusion the se-rialization of all sonic
parameters and thus remained attached to historical anachronisms.14
In a few scores from the early 1950s, notably Structures I for two
pianos (1952), Boulez applied the principle of serial organization
to pitch, duration, dynamics, and attack (all of which had to be
scrupulously notated) with the aim of engendering a self-consistent
music autonomous even from History (ex. 1). In Boulezs words, the
piece was his most ex-treme exercise in ridding his music of
foreign bodies especially stylis-tic reminiscences15, a rhetoric of
pathology resembling Cailloiss nearly contemporaneous claim that
play should not be contaminated by the real world16.
While the self-enclosed musical work was notated in a score that
left little room for performative interpretation or play, observers
perceived a semblance of the ludic in Boulezs compositional process
itself. In a 1957 article published in the premiere European organ
for serialist discourse, Die Reihe, music theorist Herbert Eimert
suggested that the intersection of mechanical automatism and
subjective choice that the serial composer must negotiate in his
recourse to systematic operations17 resembles the re-lationship in
games between pre-given rules and the decisions of the play-ers.
According to Eimert, both serialism and games sublimate arbitrary
(or irrational) subjectivity into a non-arbitrary hidden
machinery.18 Fellow composer Gyrgi Ligeti alleged, in a 1952
article, that Boulezs system its-elf was flawed interesting as a
game, he wrote, but fundamentally arbit-
14 Boulez, Pierre: Schoenberg is Dead, in: Notes of an
Apprenticeship, ed. Paul Theve-nin, trans. Herbert Weinstock, New
York 1968, p. 209-14.
15 Boulez, Pierre: On my Structures for Two Pianos (1952), in:
Sonus, trans. Otta Laske, vol. 24, no. 2, Spring 2004, p. 78.
16 Caillois 2001, p. 44. 17 This might include creating matrices
of pitch rows, manipulating these rows to derive
series for other parameters such as duration, and further
systematizing the relation-ship between different musical
parameters through mechanistic means.
18 Eimerts statement reads: Hidden machinery is at work hereone
might say that this combination of dream and exact thinking is the
patterns, the artistically colou-red pattern, for the
aforementioned functions of system and choice. But even if we stay
on strictly theoretical ground: games, too, are neither purely
arbitrary nor wholly mechanical; they are not even a cross between
the two. In serial music this becomes clear as soon as one sees
clearly that while the composer is still bound to the elements
intelligible to him, he is at the same time carrying out
compositional strategy. Ei-mert, Herbert: The Composers Freedom of
Choice, in: Die Reihe, vol. 3, 1957, p. 2. For more on the subject
of compositional techniques (including serialism), me-chanics, and
games see: Krones, Hartmut: Spiel, Kombination und Mechanik in der
Musik(geschichte), in: Arnold Schnbergs Schachzge: Dodekaphonie und
Spiele-Kon-struktionen, ed. Christian Meyer, Wien 2006, p.
59-84.
In order to make sense of the connection between these
compositional and notational tendencies it is necessary to back up
a bit and briefly set the stage for this relatively late phase of
musical modernism.
Owing to its ephemerality and supposedly non-representational
cha-racter, music was widely regarded within nineteenth-century
aesthetic dis-course from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Walter Pater as the
most emblemati-cally non-functional and autonomous of the arts.
Music was even conceived of as autonomous from the phenomenal world
as such, following the ap-pearance around 1800 of the concept of an
ideal musical work.11 Yet the transcendence imputed to musical
works the idea that they exist beyond sonic instantiation was
predicated on an increased authority accorded to their material
representation: the notated score.12 And in fact, from the ear-ly
nineteenth century onwards, Western composers employed increasingly
detailed and regulative notations that stipulated not only pitch
and rhythm, but ever finer qualities of dynamics, tempo, and
articulation.
As notation became even more nuanced in the scores of early
twen-tieth-century modernists, the Romantic conception of musical
autonomy gradually gave way to a less overtly transcendent
philosophy of formal autonomy, exemplified by Arnold Schoenbergs
pithy description of his twelve-tone musical technique as
composition with twelve notes related only to one another.13 The
postwar heirs to twelve-tone composition, prominently including
Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, sought even more fervently
a music of autonomous forms purified of external re-
11 According to Lydia Goehrs landmark study, The Imaginary
Museum of Musical Works, in the early nineteenth century, art music
in the West began to be conceived no longer as an activity of
ever-changing performances but as a repertoire of discrete,
repeatab-le, and highly determinate works. While almost all
musicologists would now concur that the concept of a musical work
was indeed a thoroughly historical phenomenon and thus came about
at some point there is significant controversy about when this was,
and whether Goehrs periodization is correct. See, for example, The
Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, ed. Michael Talbot, Liverpool
2000.
12 In order to be true to the composers work, performers were
increasingly expected to strictly adhere to its notational
representation. An early instance of this werktreue paradigm can be
seen in E. T. A. Hoffmanns seminal 1813 essay on Beethovens
ins-trumental music: The true artist lives only in the work that he
has understood as the composer meant it and that he then performs.
He is above putting his own personality forward in any way, and all
his endeavors are directed toward a single end that all the
wonderful and enchanting pictures and apparitions that the composer
has sealed into his work with magic power may be called into active
life, shining in a thousand colors, and that they may surround
mankind in luminous sparkling circles and, enkindling its
imagination, its innermost soul, may bear it in rapid flight into
the faraway spirit realm of sound. Hoffmann, E. T. A.: Beethovens
Instrumental Music, in: Source Rea-dings in Music History, ed.
Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler, New York 1998, p. 1197f.
13 Schoenberg, Arnold: Composition with Twelve Tones (1941), in:
Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black, Berkeley/Los
Angeles 1975, p. 218. This sentiment resembles Stravinskys
aesthetic thought during the period, as well as roughly
con-temporaneous developments in New Critical literary theory.
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172 DaviD Gutkin 173notation Games
rary.19 Unsurprisingly, Boulez was said to be extremely upset
about Ligetis analysis. Following arbitrary rules as if they were
not arbitrary may be done with playful self-awareness in the case
of the game-player but not in the case of the serialist, for whom
the development of compositional method was understood to follow a
necessary telos.20 Another common criticism of Structures I still
heard today is that its construction is more interesting than its
sound; it is held to be overly intellectual blackboard music or
paper music.21 Structures I has thus been regarded as only so many
games played on the page. And because of their complexity, these
games can never quite be realized in performance anyway. In this
reading, the culmination of the process inaugurated in the
nineteenth century is the autonomous musical work as a
hyper-determinate score that must remain silent. (See, however, my
Listening Exercise 1 in the appendix.)
The emergence of radically indeterminate, so-called graphic
scores in the 1950s represented, in many respects, a reaction
against hyper-deter-minate notation and the serial compositional
principles associated with it. Placing the fixed musical work in
question, a number of composers pro-minently, Cage, Morton Feldman,
and Earle Brown began to develop a constellation of variously
indeterminate notational practices that someti-mes dispensed with
conventional notational signs entirely. With Projection 1 (1950),
Morton Feldman sketched rectangular shapes on graph paper to
indicate indeterminate pitches (with stipulations only of high,
middle, and low registers), while durations were represented
spatially. Far more enig-matically, for the score December 1952,
Earle Brown drew thirty-one ver-tical and horizontal line segments
across a large sheet of paper, providing
19 With that phrase Ligeti is specifically describing Boulezs
series of dynamic levels. Elsewhere, he critiques Boulezs arbitrary
derivation of durations. The selection of dynamic proportions
according to this diagonal process is interesting as a game, but is
even less functional than the duration-permutation described
[previously]; it is not derived from the musical material, but from
a numerical abstraction. Ligeti, Gyr-gi: Decision and Automatism in
Structure Ia, trans. Leo Black, in: Die Reihe, vol. 4, 1958, p. 41.
At the same time, Ligeti did not attack Structures Ia on sonic
grounds, and in fact he is one of the few commentators to have
found anything interesting to say about how it sounds.
20 In 1952, Boulez notoriously declared, Anyone who has not felt
I do not say under-stand but felt the necessity of the dodecaphonic
[twelve-tone] language is USEL-ESS. Boulez, Pierre: Eventuellement,
in: Notes of an Apprenticeship, ed. Paul The-venin, trans. Herbert
Weinstock, New York 1968, p. 113.
21 Morton Feldman (for whom Boulez was a kind of bte noire and
cipher for all that was wrong with European composition) implicitly
makes this accusation: If one hears what one composes by that I
mean not just paper music how can one not be seduced by the
sensuality of sound? Feldman, Morton: Sound, Noise, Varse, Bou-lez,
in: Audio Cultures: Readings in Modern Music, eds. Christoph Cox
and Daniel Warner, New York/London 2004, p. 15.
Ex.1: Pierre Boulez, Structures Ia, measures 49-54
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174 DaviD Gutkin 175notation Games
chestra does indeed correspond to a work, but a special kind
that he calls an aleamorphic work. The notation of an aleamorphic
work functions like the constitutive rules of a game. Just as any
two tennis matches will differ from each other, while both being
instances of the game called tennis, each instantiation of an
aleamorphic work may consist of different sound-events while still
constituting a genuine instance of the work as long as the
stipulated set of rules has been followed.24
But it must be conceded that Tormeys rule-instantiation model
does not fare so well when confronted with a score such as Browns
December 1952 that is to say, a score that does not seem to impose
even a mini-mum criterion for identity between performances (other
than, perhaps, a common intention to perform it). Although a
performance might be un-convincing, how could it fail to yield a
genuine instance of the work De-cember 1952?25 Or consider, for
instance, Piece 3 from Sylvano Bussottis Five Piano Pieces for
David Tudor (1959): the score is comprised of around one-hundred
hand-drawn, irregular horizontal lines which form a rectang-le.
Scattered among and within these lines are little figurations: an
arc, a parallelogram, a profusion of dots (ex. 3). There are no
instructions for performance. Although very far removed in
conception and notation from Boulezs Structures I, these scores by
Brown and Bussotti also verge on silence, although for opposite
reasons. Not only do they not represent au-tonomous works in much
detail, they indicate no sounds in particular.26
mark to mark. Nothing can be determined to be a true copy of
Cages autograph dia-gram or to be a performance of it. Goodman,
Nelson: Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols,
Indianapolis, IN 1976 [1968]), p. 189-90.
24 Tormey, Alan: Indeterminacy and Identity in Art, in: Monist,
vol. 58, no. 2, 1974, p. 206f. 25 But even if it is only as ciphers
of intentionality, scores like Browns and Bussottis are
certainly operative in some way. While they include no clear
identity constraints, the-se scores do nevertheless condition and
frame performance. Caillois observes that a fictive element is
often appended to free play (e.g., children playing cops and
robbers) in which the sentiment as if takes on and performs the
same function as do rules. (Caillois 2001, p. 8) Doesnt the
performer of December 1952 constrain improvisation not by explicit
rules but by a fictive guise? The performer plays as if it is these
signs (and, by extension, the work December 1952) that are being
instantiated and the audience, if it is cooperative, plays along.
By this I do not at all intend to denigrate such scores nor the
performances they yield, although I recognize that my position
draws perilously close to the reactionary dogma that modern art has
been a variation on the tale of the emperors new clothes.
26 David Tudor, the dedicatee, could not even decide which parts
of the notation to look at. He asked: Should everything be
interpreted? Black and white? Only black? Only white? All lines?
Eventually Tudor decided that all lines must be sound. Bussot-ti
disagreed. He stated that he had drawn the score according to no
specific musi-cal application or possibilities of execution. The
performer, he continued, need not utilize all graphics but only
those that his or her eye encountered in the moment of performance.
For more on this, see my Drastic or Plastic?: Threads from
Karlheinz Stockhausens Musik und Graphik, 1959, in: Perspectives of
New Music , vol. 50, nos. 1&2, 2012, p. 272.
hardly any guidelines for their sonic realization (ex. 2).22
Other scores of the period liberally mixed traditional and
idiosyncratic notations, such as Cages mammoth Concert for Piano
and Orchestra (1957-58), which em-ploys eighty-four notational
forms accompanied by an extensive key to interpretation.
According to the definition of notation that philosopher Nelson
Goodman proposed in his 1968 book Languages of Art, such scores
(one of his actual examples is notation BB from Cages Concert for
Piano and Orchestra) satisfy neither the syntactic nor semantic
requirements of nota-tional schemes and systems, nor are they
strictly allographic.23 That is, they do not yield works as
repeatable identities. Against Goodman, philosopher Alan Tormey
argued that a score such as Cages Concert for Piano and Or-
22 In addition to the supplementary notebook sketch (shown in
example 2) Brown provided the following lengthy, and somewhat
technical sounding, but nevertheless rather loose indications: The
composition may be performed in any direction from any point in the
defined space for any length of time and may be performed from any
of the four rational positions in any sequence. In a performance
utilizing only three dimensions as active (vertical, horizontal,
and time), the thickness of the event indica-tes the relative
intensity and/or (where applicable instrumentally) clusters. Where
all four dimensions are active, the relative thickness and length
of events are functions of their conceptual position on a plane
perpendicular to the vertical and horizontal plane of the score. In
the latter case all of the characteristics of sound and their
relationships to each other are subject to continual transformation
and modification. It is primarily intended that performances be
made directly from this graphic implication (one for each
performer) and that no further preliminary defining of the events,
other than an agreement as to total performance time, take place.
Further defining of the events is not prohibited however, provided
that the imposed determinate-system is implicit in the score and in
these notes. Brown, Earle: Prefatory Note, in: Folio and Four
Sys-tems, New York/London: 1961.
23 The Stanford dictionary of philosophy has a good summary of
Goodmans very pre-cise but complex formulations: the syntactic
requirements for a notational scheme are disjointness (each mark
belongs to no more than one character) and finite dif-ferentiation,
or articulation (in principle, it is always possible to determine
to which character a mark belongs); the semantic requirements for a
notational system of which all notational schemes are not
necessarily members are 1) the characters are correlated to the
field of reference unambiguously (with no character being
correlated to more than one class of reference, or compliance
class), 2) what a character refers to the compliance class must not
intersect the compliance class of another charac-ter (i.e., the
characters must be semantically disjoint), and 3) it is always
possible to determine to which symbol an item in the field of
reference complies (i.e., the system must be, semantically,
finitely differentiated). See
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goodman-aesthetics/#TheSymSysLanArt
for clarification of this terminology. On Cages notation BB from
the Concert for Piano and Orchestra Goodman writes: Now I am by no
means pronouncing upon whether adoption of a system like that
described might nevertheless be a good idea () Nor am I quibbling
about the proper use of such words as notation, score, and work.
That matters little more than the pro-per use of a fork. What does
matter is that the system in question furnishes no means of
identifying a work from performance to performance or even of a
character from
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176 DaviD Gutkin 177notation Games
Ex.3: Sylvano Bussotti, Piece 3 from Five Piano Pieces for David
Tudor
In fact, during the 1950s composers began discussing notations
increa-sing propensity to dispense with the representation of
sound, and at times spoke of notations transformation into a field
of autonomous graphics. Around the same period, musical scores,
especially graphically elaborate ones, were increasingly displayed
in galleries and sold as fine art. It is thus an ironic development
in the history of musical autonomy that the most radical attempts
to negate the ideal, autonomous musical work yielded a type of
score that resembled the very model of the work-concept: namely,
the plastic or pictorial art object.27
27 Stockhausen discusses the notational shift into autonomous
graphics in a series of lec-tures titled Musik und Graphik
delivered in 1959 at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse. I consider more
fully the ironic developments in the history of graphic notation in
the concluding section of Drastic or Plastic, p. 282-286.
Ex.2: Earle Brown, December 1952 and diagram from Prefatory
Note
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178 DaviD Gutkin 179notation Games
music, on the other hand, was to allow for external conflict
between opposing musicians whereby one partys move would influence
and con-dition that of the other.31 In pursuit of this heteronomous
music, Xenakis began to experiment with ideas drawn from the
recently emerging mathe-matical and economic field of game theory
in two game scores, Duel (1959) and Stratgie (1962). In both pieces
there are two separate orchestras each equipped with its own
conductor. Each conductor makes moves in what, according to game
theory, would be categorized as a zero-sum game.32 Eve-ry move is
conveyed by the conductor to his or her respective orchestra,
resulting in a specified sound (the music) which simultaneously
informs the competing conductor of the move just played (ex. 4).
(In a sense, the conductors are the players of the game and the
orchestras are the games pieces.) According to Xenakis, audiences
followed the musical games in-tently aided by a display board and
even cheered good moves.33
Xenakis game scores reflected his entirely serious, formal
interest in game theory, but they also represented a
self-consciously comic attempt to transpose the high sphere of
avant-garde music into the more common world of games and spectator
sports. (Xenakis stipulated that at the end of the game, a winner
should be announced and a trophy presented by the judge.) But while
the playfully agonistic and ritualistic environment created by
these performances was at odds with the dominant ethos of solemn
and intellectualized postwar musical modernism, a separation from
the every-day clearly remained if as the ludic theorists insisted
games stand apart from ordinary life.34
31 Xenakis, Iannis: Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in
Composition, Bloo-mington/London 1971, p. 110-111.
32 Wikipedia defines zero-sum game as follows: In game theory
and economic the-ory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical
representation of a situation in which a participants gain (or
loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of
the utility of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the
participants are added up and the total losses are subtracted, they
will sum to zero. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game
(accessed: 2014/12/19)
33 Although it scarcely suffices as a substitute for the
spectator experience, a 1966 recor-ding of Stratgie played by
conductors Seiji Ozawa and Hiroshi Wakasugi with the Yomiuri Nippon
Symphony Orchestra can be found on the LP: Ligeti / Ichiyanagi /
Takemitsu / Xenakis Orchestral Space (Varese Sarabande Label,
1978). This record is out-of-print and hard to find, so the reader
might instead try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipwbze36uj0
(accessed: 2014/12/19)
34 The socio-economic backgrounds of the musicians and audiences
involved with Xenakiss work may have been fairly homogenous.
Nevertheless, his game pieces as well as some of his later
ritualistic happenings/events seem to suggest a bid for a more
popular or communal avant-gardism.
II Autonomy and Everyday Life
By the mid-1950s, some of the composers who had been most
intensively involved in the serial project themselves began to
experiment with alter-natives to the closed work. Boulez, for
example, came to incorporate in-determinate properties into his
Third Piano Sonata (1955-57). The score is precisely notated but
can be navigated by the player in multiple ways. Boulez compared it
both to a maze and to a map of a city; the basic elements retain
their identity but the potential passageways offered to the
performer are multiple. The literary theorist Hans Rudolph Zeller
made a related analogy: to a game.28 It is worth noting that Boulez
conceived of the Third Sonatas interactive, game-like dimension as
a shift away from the au-tonomously aesthetic a new perspective
supposedly indebted to his study of non-Western musical cultures.
Nothing I found [in the music of Afri-ca and the Far East] was
based on the masterpiece, he wrote, on the closed cycle, on passive
contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure. In these
civilizations music is a way of existence in the world of which it
forms an integral part and with which it is indissolubly linked an
ethical rather than simply aesthetic category.29 Nevertheless,
neither Boulezs open-form score, nor more radically indeterminate
graphic scores, did much to transform the social fact of
avant-garde musics relative autonomy. These experiments did not
shatter the regime of the aesthetic and make art a way of
existence. Audiences at Darmstadt still sat in dimmed rooms and
ob-served the paradigmatic behaviors of nineteenth-century concert
etiquette. Equally to the point, audiences and composers of
avant-garde music still came, by and large, from a narrow slice of
the European and Euro-Ameri-can class system (and, predominantly,
one side of the gender divide).30 But what of a score that is not
just like a game but really is a game? Would that narrow the
distance between the avant-garde and the everyday world?
During the late 1950s, Iannis Xenakis began to develop what he
called heteronomous music, which he opposed to autonomous music. In
au-tonomous music, Xenakis wrote, virtually everything is written
into the score. Even if the composer allows for instances of
indeterminacy and improvisation, the only conflict is internal and
shut up inside the score. The role of the performers is still only
that of controlling the output (sound) by comparison with the input
(the notation). Heteronomous
28 Zeller, Hans Rudolph: Mallarm and Serialist Thought, in: Die
Reihe, vol. 6, 1960, p. 18.29 Pierre Boulez, Sonate, que me
veux-tu?, in: Orientations: Collected Writings, ed.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans Martin Cooper, Cambridge, MA 1986,
p. 145. Boulez would also cite Mallarms Un Coup de Ds Jamais
NAbolira Le Hasard as an ins-piration for his experimentation with
open-form works. He was surely responding, as well, to the chance
and indeterminate compositional and notational techniques of Cage
and the American experimental circle. See also Ala, in:
Orientations.
30 Thanks to Len Gutkin for suggesting this very important last
point.
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180 DaviD Gutkin 181notation Games
Far more than Boulez or even Xenakis, it was John Cage (and his
stu-dents, notably Alan Kaprow35) who sought to dissolve the
barrier separa-ting the autonomously aesthetic from quotidian
activities and the everyday world. Everything we do is music, Cage
famously proclaimed. So perhaps it is not surprising that he
objected to the characterization of his composi-tional methods
(including chance techniques and indeterminate notation) as
game-like; he was bound to be opposed to any kind of activity that
was said to stand apart from the world. Asked about his criticism
of the term play Cage once responded: I read part of that book
called Homo Ludens, do you know it? It discusses man as the playing
one and the whole business of setting up rules whereby a game may
be played, furthermore setting up a place in which to play in all
kinds of ways producing separation from the rest of the world. All
of that annoys me.36 But given Cages compositio-nal and notational
techniques, the comparison with games is unavoidable: for Music of
Changes (1951) he flipped coins and, in consultation with the I
Ching, transcribed the results in exacting notation; for the
aforementi-oned Concert for Piano and Orchestra he drew playful
notations and accom-panied them with lengthy lists of rules; and
for Reunion (1968), he even
35 Kaprow often described his art-life activities (doing life,
consciously) in terms of play and games. Having once characterized
the Happening as a game, an adventure, a number of activities
engaged in by participants for the sake of playing, Kaprow la-ter
drew a finer distinction between game and play: The critical
difference between gaming and playing cannot be ignored. Both
involve free fantasy and apparent spon-taneity, both may have clear
structures, both may (but neednt) require special skills that
enhance the playing. Play, however, offers satisfaction, not in
some stated practical outcome, some immediate accomplishment, but
rather in continuous participation as its own end. Taking sides,
victory, and defeat, all irrelevant in play, are the chief
requi-sites of game. In play one is carefree; in a game one is
anxious about winning. With a nod to Huizinga, Kaprow suggests that
the artist absorb this ideal of non-producti-ve, non-competitive
activity and reinvent him or herself as the player. Kaprow, Alan:
Education of the un-artist part 2, in: Essays on the Blurring of
Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1993, p.
122, 125f.
36 Kostelanetz, Richard: Conversing with Cage, New York 2003, p.
280. The full state-ments reads: Yes, I dont like it. I mean I dont
like the idea that that is what art is. The reason I dont is
because myI read part of that book called Homo Ludens, do you know
it? It discusses man as the playing one and the whole business of
setting up rules whereby a game may be played, furthermore setting
up a place in which to play in all kinds of ways producing
separation from the rest of the world. All of that annoys me. And
then invention, you see, which Im so involved in, is bad because it
changes the rules. And thats what I mean when I refer to spoilsport
because an inventor sim-ply ruins the game. But I dont think were
playing games. I like to play games, but I dont think of art as
being that. I think that we should treat politics and economics, as
they are now dying, as games, and I think we should treat this new
thing coming into being as inviting celebration. Now I dont think
that it is we who are celebrating. I think that it is it thats
celebrating. I prefer that notion to the notion of games.
Ex.4: Iannis Xenakis, Matrix for Stratgie, COPYRIGHT 1967 BY
BOOSEY & HAWKES MUSIC PUBLISHERS LIMITED
Mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Boosey & Hawkes Bote &
Bock GmbH, Berlin
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182 DaviD Gutkin 183notation Games
the form of all possible facts. Wittgensteins seminal text
inspired Cor-nelius Cardews monumental graphic score, Treatise
(1963-67), comprised of 193 pages of finely drawn lines, bulbous
shapes, and other pictorially elegant geometric figurations, with
only the occasional vestige of conventi-onal notational symbols and
no accompanying directions (ex. 5). Just what did this
music-notational epic have to do with the Tractatus?
In fact, Wittgenstein invoked musical notation in an important
pas-sage of the Tractatus: The gramophone record, the musical
thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in
that pictorial internal relation which holds between language and
the world. To all of them the logical structure is common. (Like
the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story.
They are all in a certain sense one.)39 But it would appear that
Cardews score stands in no clear relation to any sonic content. And
yet it was precisely as a self-contained symbolic system that was
to be in need of no supplementary clarification that Cardews
notation was indebted to Wittgensteins conception of the logical
proposition.
39 Section 4.014. These thoughts begin: At first glance the
proposition say as it stands printed on paper does not seem to be a
picture of the reality of which it treats. But nor does the musical
score appear at first sight to be a picture of a musical piece; nor
does our phonetic spelling (letters) seem to be a picture of our
spoken language. And yet these symbolisms prove to be pictures even
in the ordinary sense of what they represent. [4.011] A bit later
Wittgenstein writes: In the fact that there is a general rule by
which the musician is able to read the symphony out of the score,
and there is a rule by which one could reconstruct the symphony
from the line on a gramophone record and from this again by means
of the first rule construct the score, herein lies the internal
similarity between these things which at first sight seem to be
entirely different. [4.0141] Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden, New York 2003 [1922], p.
39-41.
Ex.5: Cornelius Cardew, Treatise, page 145
played a game of chess against Marcel Duchamp in which the
pieces and board were equipped with sound-yielding circuitry,
rendering them both instrument and score.
So, why so much game playing in Cages version of life? For Cage,
game-like procedures seemed to serve a purpose related to that of
auto-matic serial processes: they allowed for the negation of
tradition and sub-jectivity, except that these negations were aimed
not at transcending the world but at stripping away the
conventionalized detritus that prevents its being encountered in
itself . Here the fundamental arbitrariness of games was not
necessarily problematic (as it was for the young Boulez) because
Cages systems were not meant to be self-contained, but rather to
open back onto the very contingency of phenomenal existence from
which they derived. This might be observed in Cages flipping of
coins to engender notation or in his transformation of
imperfections found in sheets of paper (the surface of notational
inscription itself) into sounds for his Music for Piano series
(1952-1962). Of course, listening to or playing Cages scores still
does not yield what we generally think of as ordinary experiences
of the everyday world. Borrowing a phrase from Michel de Certeau,
we could say that Cages compression of the immanent and the ludic
produced a kind of pseudo-autonomous hagiographic
everydayness.37
III: Notation and the Form of the World
A kind of counterpart to the Cageian attempt to fuse the
autonomous and the worldly might be seen in the vision of a total
world doubled in its own autonomous representation. Although many
writers have played with the idea of representational totality, it
has usually been as a thought game (e.g., Jorge Luis Borgess
Library of Babel) or an exercise in futility (e.g., Gertrude Steins
ambition in The Making of Americans to describe every kind of
person who has lived).38 Perhaps philosophers are more hubristic
than novelists. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig
Wittgentstein sought to articulate all that can be known about the
world by showing
37 De Certeau used the phrase pejoratively: Far from arbitrarily
assuming the privilege of speaking in the name of the ordinary (it
cannot be spoken), or claiming to be in that general place (that
would be a false mysticism), or, worse, offering up a hagiographic
everydayness for its edifying value, it is a matter of restoring
historicity to the mo-vement which leads analytical procedures back
to their frontiers, to the point where they are changed, indeed
disturbed, by the ironic and mad banality that speaks in the
everyman in the sixteenth century and that has returned in the
final stages of Freuds knowledge. Certeau, Michel de: The Practice
of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley/Los
Angeles 1984, p. 5.
38 In a rather less playful vein, Lukacs described the epic as a
form that should represent what Hegel called a totality of objects.
See esp. Lukcs, Georg: The Historical Novel, trans Hannah Mitchell
and Stanley Mitchell, Boston 1962, p. 93.
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184 DaviD Gutkin 185notation Games
Cardew described a 1966 performance of Treatise that he
participated in with the improvisation collective AMM as the
turning point, and said: I now regard Treatise as a transition
between my early preoccupations with problems of music notation and
my present concerns improvisation and a musical life.44 Perhaps the
trajectory of Cardews thought,45 from his early concern with
self-consistent notational systems to his later dedication to
improvisational performance and a musical life, recalls
Wittgensteins own philosophical evolution: Having renounced the
metaphysical concep-tion of an autonomous and pure logical
language, the philosopher concei-ved of language-games whose rules
were indissociable from use, and thus comprised a form of life.
Conclusion
I have tried to show how in the course of about two decades a
group of composers grappled with the tensions inherent in the
multifaceted concept of autonomy. Since musical notation was
inextricably bound up with this concept, it inevitably comprised
one of the central elements in these nego-tiations. But why were
ludic techniques and tropes so pervasive? We should observe that
play and game are notoriously open-ended words. (Spiel meaning both
play and game was Wittgensteins paradigmatic example
44 Cardew 1971, p x-xi. Cardew writes: However I would have been
a great deal loster if it hadnt been for the performance of January
1966 () Joining AMM was the turning point, both in the composition
of Treatise and in everything I have thought about mu-sic up to
now. Before that, Treatise had been an elaborate attempt at graphic
notation of music; after that time it became simply graphic music
(which I can only define as a graphic score that produces in the
reader, without any sound, something analogous to the experience of
music), a network of nameless lines and spaces pursuing their own
geometry untethered to themes and modulations, 12-note series and
their transforma-tions, the rules or laws of musical composition
and all the other figments of the musi-cological imagination. / Up
to the time of this performance, improvisation had always terrified
me; I thought it must be something like composing, but accelerated
a million times, a feat of which I knew I was incapable. With the
AMM improvisers I discovered that anyone can play, me too,
provided, as a Chinese musician of the 16th century put it, the
thoughts are serious, the mind peaceful and the will resolute, and
what comes out in such play is vital and direct, rather than a
translation or interpretation of intel-lect, attitude, notation,
inspiration or what have you.
45 There was, in fact, a final turn in Cardews philosophical and
political development, and once again notation was a source of
contention. In 1971, Cardew writes, he found himself tippedinto the
maelstrom of class struggle. No longer was a musical life achieved
through experimental modes of improvisation a sufficient goal. To
ad-dress real problems in the real world music had to be political,
useful, and populist. At the same time, he turned against Treatise
and decided that it was in fact no better than Bussottis
aestheticized scores. Treatise, he concluded, was a particularly
strik-ing outbreak ofa disease of notation, namely the tendency for
musical notations to become aesthetic objects in their own
right.
According to the Tractatus, an adequately notated logical
proposition would be internally consistent, self-evident, and,
admitting no supple-mentary metalanguage, fundamentally
self-contained. But it would not therefore be divorced from the
world. It would describe the scaffolding of the world but treat of
nothing. In a gloss on this passage, Cardew wrote of his
score-in-process: Reference. What is the reference of the network?
This is meaningless. Something things should be referable to the
network.40 Indeed Cardew took Wittgensteins hard-to-imagine
con-cept of logical notation as an ideal. Thus, Treatise was to be
a self-contained symbolic system without need of any additional
directions. That it does not describe or prescribe any particular
sounds no pitches, no rhythms is the point, since, according to the
Tractatus, logical propositions reflect (and are reflected within)
the world not as specific empirical things but as formal (or
logical) possibilities.
For all the apparent attention to graphic elegance, Cardew
sharply distinguished between his notational project and what he
described as Bussottis non-functional aesthetic notations[n]otation
for its own sake.41 Even though the notation in Treatise designates
no specific sound or action, the score was not intended as only a
vague stimulus for perfor-mance. Cardew writes: The score must
govern the music. It must have authority, and not merely be an
arbitrary jumping-off point for improvisa-tion, with no internal
consistency.42 A player might decide, for example, that circular
shapes always correspond to harmonics, and would then have to
determine some sort of rule that makes sonic sense of the variation
in circle size, the position of the circles on the page, and so on.
Writing about this kind of interpretive decision, Cardew, in his
private notes on Treati-se, paraphrases Wittgenstein on the role of
arbitrary yet binding rules in games: And if e.g. you play a game
you hold by its rules. And it is an inte-resting fact that people
set up rules for pleasure and then hold by them.43
After five years of struggling with Treatise Cardew eventually
recog-nized insurmountable contradictions in his project. But
instead of thinking of the score as a failure he began to
understand it as a transitional endea-vor that led him to a new
conception of music. On a 1970 radio broadcast
40 Wittgenstein 2003, p. 131 [6.124]. Cardew, Cornelius:
Treatise Handbook, including Bun no. 2 Volo Solo, New York 1971, p.
iv.
41 A musical notation that looks beautiful is not a beautiful
notation, because it is not the function of a musical notation to
look beautiful (functionalism). Any attempts in this direction
(Bussotti) could be called aesthetic notations. Notation for its
own sake, but in a different sense from say, pure mathematics.
Cardew, Cornelius: Nota-tion, Interpretation, Etc., in: Tempo 58,
Summer 1961, p. 29.
42 Cardew 1971, p. iv. 43 Ibid., vii. Cardew presents the line
as a direct quotation of Wittgenstein. I cant locate
this exact phrase in any English translation of Wittgenstein,
but it is certainly close to a number of statements from
Philosophical Investigations. Cardew read German well, and it may
have been his own translation.
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186 DaviD Gutkin 187notation Games
mathematically coherent, that the structures should lay
themselves bare to the ear. Although Boulez was in part guilty of
fostering this interpreta-tion with scientistic writings (and with
titles like Structures), his aesthe-tics stemmed equally from a
poetics of violence, indebted in particular to Antonin Artaud. The
autonomous system was not meant to be heard as such, nor was the
ascetic rigidity of the movements construction me-ant to translate
into a clarity of perception.48 Rather, the sonic experience should
have triggered what Boulez called the disintegration of
conventio-nal listening49, a kind of frenzied dissociation
resulting from the calculated short-circuiting of memory and
historical reference a music of difference and infinite play,
paradoxically engendered by a theoretically closed system. When I
listened to the piece closely, I found that the critics were right
but for the wrong reasons. Structures I is a failure, not because
it sounds ran-dom but because it sounds too logical, traditional,
and even good a value judgment only possible on the basis of
historical criteria.
Pulling myself away from the score, I was surprised to discover
that I heard a coherent, even quasi-traditional musical rhetoric in
Structures Ia (the first and most heavily serially automated
movement of the piece). From this realization I set out to discover
what else I might hear if, instead of thinking about the serial
processes that I had been trained to recognize in the score, I
allowed myself to form a detailed and quite personal auditory
understanding of the work. I then elucidated this process by
returning to the score and mapping my listening back onto it. The
following is a con-densed and fragmentary representation of this
listening exercise.
Boulez divides Structures Ia into eleven sections, each
separated by a brief pause. I describe moments from the first three
sections, and then I consider one aspect of the whole movement.
Section 1: From the very beginning I cant help but hear
something that I am sure Boulez would not want me to hear in such a
way: a direc-tionally rhyming melody two 2-note ascending phrases
followed by two 2-note descending ones (ex. 6). Boulez sought to
suppress principle and subsidiary lines in his dense polyphony but
how can these not emerge?
48 On the contrary, railing against Mondrians austere,
constructivist tendencies, Boulez (in a letter to John Cage) held
up Klees paintings as preferable: His [Mondrians] works are the
most denuded of mystery that have ever been in the world.It is
against the facility of a Mondrian that I rise up. After this
Boulez writes: For the rest, genu-ine works are those in which one
can never come to an end (infinite [infrangible?] nucleus of the
night.); and when all is said, one still has said nothing, and one
will never say anything. Boulez, Pierre. The Boulez-Cage
Correspondence, ed. and col-lected Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans.
Robert Samuels, Cambridge 1993, p. 116f.
49 Boulez 2004, p. 83.
of a word that resists regulative definition.)46 Perhaps it was
partially owing to some fundamental ambiguities in the idea of
game/play encompassing, as it does, a continuum of activities that
run from the hyper-regulated to the entirely improvised, and
dichotomously describing both abstract rules and embodied actions
that the ludic was useful both to those composers who aimed to
construct purified autonomous systems and to those who would
endeavor to open these up to the world. Further elaboration of this
conjecture would be a topic for another essay.
What I have most wanted to thematize here were the complex
super-impositions and oscillations conjoining the transcendently
autonomous and the immanently quotidian. In each case some vestige
of the autono-my concept was retained. Cardews improvisational
musical life is also, presumably, not everyday life (although the
problematic denotation of that last phrase grows increasingly
clear). Nevertheless, we can identify a gene-ral trajectory since
the midcentury away from the autonomy principle, and therefore away
from aesthetics as such.
Appendix: Two Listening Exercises
ExErcisE 1:
What would be different has not begun as yet. (Th. W.
Adorno)
As I observed above, Structures I has often been regarded as
only so many numerical games.47 A corollary of which is that the
piece has been consi-dered as suitable for score-based, but not
sonic, analysis. When Structures I is in fact listened to, a common
observation is that despite its systematic construction, it sounds
as chaotic as works composed through chance ope-rations, such as
John Cages contemporaneous Music of Changes (1951). But I believe
the critique of sonic randomness is founded on a misappre-hension,
namely the assumption that the work should sound objective or
46 Wittgenstein famously argued for the inadequacy of regulative
linguistic definitions by showing that no single characteristic is
common to all activities we call games (board-games, card-games,
ball-games, athletic games but also singing and dancing games).
Thus, he suggests that it is not with ideal definitions but in a
wonderfully recur-sive move with the language-games that comprise
real linguistic practices that we should begin. Wittgenstein,
Ludwig: Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Ans-combe, P.
M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, Malden/Oxford 2009 [1953],
36e.
47 Dominique Jameaux also argues against the disparaging
classification of Structures Ia as blackboard music. Jameaux,
Dominique: Pierre Boulez, trans. Susan Bradshaw, Cambridge, Mass.
1991, p. 283.
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188 DaviD Gutkin 189notation Games
Ex.7: Pierre Boulez, Structures Ia, measures 8-11Ex.9: Pierre
Boulez, Structures Ia, measures 114f.
Ex.8: Pierre Boulez, Structures Ia, measures 32f.
Section 2: The atonality fissures into competing harmonic
regions as clusters of white-key harmonies (a, d, a, e) are
punctuated by sequence of black-key open intervals (b-flat, e-flat,
g-sharp) (ex. 7). This harmonic con-flict is mirrored in a temporal
one. Time seems to get out of sync with itself it moves backwards
and forwards, or, better, forwards at different speeds.
Section 3: Although Boulez wrote that his durational system was
con-ceived without reference to pulse, something like a pulse
emerges. And, even more surprising, strains of tonality, with the
pitches g, a-flat, and e sounding to me like scale degrees 2, 3,
and 7 in f-minor (ex. 8). And other motives pop out of the welter
of activity.
Because of the construction of Boulezs initial row, sections 1-5
end with a tritone that most dissonant interval of Western tonal
music. This tritone acts, paradoxically, as both an element of
tension (bearing the vesti-gial trace of its dissonant function in
tonality and, given its structural recur-rence, stability. It also
exemplifies the rhyming trope. The disappearance of the tritone in
its concluding role during the second half of the movement
(sections 6-11) almost makes its role as a motive even clearer. The
trito-ne seems doubly unresolved; disappearance is not a resolution
but a new
tension. But in the final moments of the piece so-mething really
interesting happens. The three pitches (d, a, e) before the final
pitch resolve the linge-ring idea of the tritone, for-ming two open
fifths (the interval that the tritone strains toward in tonal
mu-sic) in a crystal clear high register. But the ultimate e-flat,
in a sharply contrasting bass register, forms yet ano-ther tritone
with the still ringing a (ex. 9). It is a perfect moment funny and
even poignant, and brings the work to an architecturally coherent
close.
Ex.6: Pierre Boulez, Structures Ia, measures 1-7
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190 DaviD Gutkin 191notation Games
Instead, by attempting this, you constantly highlight particular
areas in ra-pid oscillation. 2) Conversely, look closely. The lines
are not so perfect. They have subtly rough (trilling?) edges.
References
Adorno, Theodor W.: Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor Minneapolis, MN 1998.
Boulez, Pierre: Schoenberg is Dead, in Notes of an
Apprenticeship, ed. Paul Thevenin, trans. Herbert Weinstock, New
York 1968, p. 209-14.
Alea, in Notes of an Apprenticeship, ed. Paul Thevenin, trans.
Herbert Weinstock, New York 1968, p. 26-38.
Possibly in Notes of an Apprenticeship, ed. Paul Thevenin,
trans. Her-bert Weinstock, New York 1968, p. 111-140.
On My Structures for Two Pianos (1952), trans. Otta Laske, in
Sonus, volume 24, no. 2, Spring 2004, p. 77-87.
Form in Orientations, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin
Cooper, Cambridge, MA 1986, p. 90-96.
Sonate, que me veux-tu? in Orientations, trans Martin Cooper,
Cam-bridge, MA 1986 p. 143-154.
Caillois, Roger: Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash,
Urbana/Chi-cago 2001 [1961].
Cardew, Cornelius: Notation Interpretation, Etc., Tempo, no. 58,
sum-mer 1961, p. 21-33.
Cardew, Cornelius: Treatise Handbook, London: Edition Peters,
1971.de Certeau, Michel: The Practice of Everyday Life volume 1,
trans. Steven
Rendall, Berkeley/Los Angeles 1984. Eimert, Herbert: The
Composers Freedom of Choice, in Die Reihe, vol.
3, 1957, p. 1-9. Goehr, Lydia: The Imaginary Museum of Musical
Works: An Essay in Musical
Philosophy, Oxford/New York 1992. Hoffmann, E. T. A.: Beethovens
Instrumental Music, in: Source Rea-
dings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler, New
York 1998, p. 1193-1197.
Huizinga, Johan: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in
Culture. Boston 1955.
Kaprow, Allan: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff
Kelley, Berke-ley/Los Angeles 1993.
Kostelanetz, Richard: Conversing with Cage. New York 2003.
With this exercise I discovered that I cannot but hear sound
structures in reference to past experience and hence in a semiotic
system of ingrained, if contingent, meaning. My being-in-history
has rendered me necessarily inadequate to the task of encountering
the work (no less in history itself, of course) on its own
autonomous terms. In a sense, it is not only that I have analyzed
Structures Ia but that it has analyzed me; it has functioned as an
aesthetically elevated Rohrschach test to expose my own personal
idiosyncrasies and my more general cultural inheritance.
ExErcisE 2:
My procedure is simple: I listened to four performances of
December 1952 while looking at the score. (David Tudor, Michael
Daugherty, David Ar-den, ensemble conducted by Brown) My aim was
not exactly to figure out employed by the four different
interpreters, but to discover what sound illuminates about this
notation-image, and vice versa. These meditations on the score are
only a haphazard assortment of impressions. It is a somewhat
self-indulgent exercise.
What to do with the swaths of white space, the unmarked paper
around the lines? Is it silence? That is what Tudors performance
tells me, but Daughertys suggests otherwise. Here the space is
rendered percussive, an electronic resonance beneath pitched
articulation. What could make this space active? The lines do give
the white space a kind of shape. Even Tudors silence has a
shape.
I had thought the lines were sparse sort of elegant and
restrained in their subtle differences of length and width. Also,
they stayed still for Tudor and Arden. One then another, maybe a
line overlaps here and there. The ensembles performance showed
otherwise. There is an active relati-onship between lines. In fact
I noticed something strange while focusing on individual lines: a
small border of light, or space whiter than the paper appears an
optical illusion. It only works for a couple lines at a time, and
only if those lines are close to each other. I imagine the complex
relation-ships that might form between the shifting simultaneities
of illuminated lines within the ensembles collective vision. I
think there were 23 perfor-mers in the ensemble. At a given moment
were they ever all focusing on a different line, or all on the same
line? I suppose they wouldnt have known.
People speak of accurate performances of traditionally notated
mu-sic. Ardens realization here is something else altogether:
realistic.
Daughertys interpretation is striking for its apparent distance
from what I see. Why so much sonic continuity? I simplistically
associated the hanging resonances with white space, but where are
these extended me-lodic trill figures to be found on the page? I
have two ideas. 1) Step back from the score and try to take the
whole thing in at once without focusing on any particular area.
Unless you are about four feet away it cant be done.
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192 DaviD Gutkin
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