Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080459
L. Redhead
This essay posits that the practices of notation, composition, and performance are not creatively distinct from each other when observed, in particular, in radical works of graphic or text notation that make no or little reference to the western tradition of music notation, and whose composers offer no or few indications of the methods by which they should be interpreted or their intended performance outcomes. In such works of experimental music, performer choice and creativity are highlighted, but issues of composer choice and creativity may be equally observed, alongside the performative practices of notation. Understanding these practices as iterations of the same process means that the activities of notating, composing and performing can be considered as equal without the need to posit the performance of experimental scores as a compositional practice in and of itself. These ideas will be explored in examples from the works ijereja (2015–2016) and glíwmæden (2016)
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080466
J. Saunders
The paper applies theory drawn from game studies to music composition in order to consider ways in which rules and goals create environments that promote critical play and manage the balance between purpose, play and task subservience. It explores correspondences between rules in games and indeterminate music, and considers how constraints create agency for players through presenting them with choices and goals that can be linked to values. Game studies research shows that games rely on interactivity, goals, competitors and conflict (Crawford 2003), and consequently effort from its players so as to attach value to its outcomes (Juul 2003). In rule-based compositions, rules are used to present choices, allowing individual players to make autonomous decisions that are focused on achieving a specified goal. Some rule-based compositions, however, specify processes and actions that have no explicit purpose. A process is initiated, perhaps with an end condition, but there is no specified purpose, other than undertaking the tasks. Game studies research suggests ways in which games might create approaches for harnessing specific motivations of players in such contexts. Tasks in persuasive games (Bogost 2010) are designed to embody real-world challenges, while Flanagan and Nissenbaum (2014) propose an approach to game design that communicates embedded values. Such approaches translate to rule-based music, presenting models for linking tasks to purpose and play, and with it relationships with the world.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080456
Scott Mclaughlin
‘Material indeterminacy’ is the term I use to discuss how my work since 2010 has explored the consequences of placing materiality, indeterminacy, and responsiveness at the centre of a compositional practice, and what means for the relationships between instrument, player, and score. I propose that the structural consequence of contingency in instrumental performance is an underexplored aspect of experimental composition, which has historically tended to focus on models that either control contingency or obviate its consequences. ‘Material indeterminacy’ is proposed as a third way that folds the emergent consequences of contingency back into meaningful relation with the unfolding structure. This research is framed by theoretical perspectives on materiality: Andrew Pickering’s performative ontology of human and material agencies, specifically his ‘dance of agency’ between human and material; anthropologist Tim Ingold’s phenomenological approach to materiality that valorises the relational ‘working-with’ of human and material. The liveliness of materiality is considered in relation to Lucy Suchman’s work on situatedness and the entwined nature of plans and actions, and then returned to a musical context via listening and the discourse of improvisation as response-to-contingency. Finally, I discuss these ideas via examples of my own work from the Garden of Forking Paths compositional project (2019–2021).
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080458
M. Iddon
Agamben argues that, in the art of the twentieth century, two forms of art thematize a fracturing of the regime of production: in the case of conceptual ready-mades, the reproducible cannot take on the status of originality; in the case of pop art, that which “ought” to be unreproducible becomes just that. In these cases, Agamben contends, the “bringing forth” of art continues to take place, but what is brought forth is στέρησης [sterēsis], privation, an art which is necessarily alienated. This privation, in Agamben's terms, must be understood through the dyad of ϵνϵργϵια [energeia] and δυναμις [dynamis] to insist that potentiality, unactualized δυναμις is the “existence of a non-Being, a presence of an absence”, which is to say that δυναμις is only what it is because of its relationship to the potential not to take place, to αδυναμία. I argue, following Katschthaler, that a similar case must be made for Cage's 4′33″ (1952), in that it represents the possibility of inaction: the performer could always have not played. I contend that, however, the bringing forth of absence is necessarily, a sort of dead end since, in an important sense, nothing has already taken place: the performer of 4′33″ does not have the option not to play, without the performance ceasing to be a performance of 4′33″. It is my claim here, if only provisionally, that Cage’s turn to indeterminacy, and in particular his use of transparencies in his Variations piece from Variations I (1958) onwards, may be seen as a way out of, or a solution to, the impasse of a privative abyss, be that as found in conceptual art or as formulated in 4′33″.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080454
E. Payne
This article examines the dynamic nature of instrumental interaction in indeterminate music, using John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58) as a case study. Performing the Concert requires instruments to be dismantled, detuned, and destabilised, and within the parts themselves techniques are often stretched or combined to the point of complete breakdown. Drawing on interviews and observational studies undertaken with the experimental music ensemble Apartment House, I explore how the indeterminacies of the instrumental parts are enacted and negotiated in performance. The article suggests the ways in which indeterminacy is not an abstract compositional device, but is distributed across musicians, their instruments, and their environments. More broadly, it shows how a reading of indeterminacy through performance both underlines and complicates the relationships between individuals, objects, and the kinds of agency that are enacted and animated in creative work.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080460
I. Revell
This text charts the emergence of a neologism, the ‘feminist performance score’. This term arose through repeated work with, and discussion of, Pauline Oliveros’s 1970 text score To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, In Recognition of their Desperation, focusing on the relationship between the individual and the group that emerges from Oliveros’ interest in Solanas: in turn mirrored in the ‘formal duality’ of textual instructional scores more widely, as printed score and iterative live performance. The text re-introduces the Womens Work (1975–78) score magazine project co-edited by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood, considering the score collection itself as a feminist project. The concluding section sets the aesthetic of textual instructional performance scores, always already speculative, as speculatively feminist, through contemporary feminist new materialism, and in particular the work of Karen Barad.
本文描绘了一个新词的出现，“女权主义表现分数”。这个术语是通过与Pauline Oliveros 1970年的文本乐谱《致Valerie Solanas和Marilyn Monroe，In Recognition of their Desperation》的反复合作和讨论而产生的，该乐谱聚焦于Oliveros对Solanas的兴趣所产生的个人和群体之间的关系：反过来，更广泛地反映在文本教学乐谱的“形式二元性”中，作为打印分数和迭代现场表演。本文重新介绍了Alison Knowles和Annea Lockwood共同编辑的《女性工作》（1975–78）乐谱杂志项目，认为乐谱集本身就是一个女权主义项目。结论部分通过当代女权主义新唯物主义，特别是Karen Barad的作品，将文本教学表现分数的美学设定为推测性的女权主义。
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080452
Catherine Laws
What do we mean by ‘performing indeterminacy’? Performance is, on one level, always an act of substantial determinacy: we ascribe the making of a sound or action to purpose of some kind, on some level. An event is brought into existence and witnessed as such. But performance is always, also, indeterminate: contingent, contextual and unpredictable to different degrees, characterised by the significant uncertainties in the complex interactions of performers, instruments (of any kind), spaces and audiences. Performing music defined as indeterminate can, but does not always, involve indeterminacy in the event of performance. Some players, with some pieces, use the rehearsal process to explore different possibilities before determining the content to be delivered in performance. Here, the extent of that indeterminacy in performance is arguably no different to that inherent in performing any score, no matter how fully determined the content. The difference lies in the process towards performance. In contrast, there are of course many performances of indeterminate music in which players make more or less in-the-moment decisions about exact content, though from a circumscribed range of possibilities. And, equally, there are scores that themselves determine such indeterminacy in performance, with instructions that require in-performance decision making. This summary confirms the richness and complexity of the field, but while indeterminacy has been the subject of ongoing debate and theorisation for some 50 years now, the discourse remains predominantly focused upon composers: on the extent and nature of their intentions and how they are expressed in scores. In this respect, even apparently performance-orientated discussion rarely moves beyond matters of realisation: what a player can and cannot do in response to a particular score. Despite all the claims for the ways in which indeterminate music might afford players a particular creative agency, notwithstanding the insightful commentaries of certain performers, and regardless of the work of those, like George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, who have considered indeterminacy and experimentalism in relation to a wider network of musical practices, much of the discourse remains couched in the same old terms. Starting away from music, with Marjorie Perloff’s consideration of the nature of literary indeterminacy in the early 1980s, this essay explores the parallels with the reflexive quality of indeterminacy manifested in a range of performance work. The main concern is the locus of indeterminacy, focusing on its manifestation in the experience of performing; its immanence in performance. Underlying this is the contention that we don’t attend to this enough—that we might consider more carefully what constitutes indeterminacy experienced in and through performance; what we do in manifesting indeterminacy in and through performance, bringing it into the act of performance, embodying it.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080457
Sara Haefeli
Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices (2009–11) is a largely diatonic work with an infectious groove that has rocketed Shaw to stardom, earning her a Pulitzer Prize at the age of 30. But Partita’s accessible surface belies its complexity and its close relationship to the New York Schools of both music and art. Following in the footsteps of her experimental forerunners, Shaw’s notations are indeterminate and, therefore, situated in a community of musicians that become co-creators with Shaw. The graphic notations that Shaw employs are largely an attempt to indicate timbral variety, as Shaw borrows from a wide variety of global vocal techniques for this piece. The focus of this study is on the problems Partita poses as a result of its timbral variety and the graphic notations that function as instructions for the group of highly-trained ‘insiders’ performing it, namely, Shaw’s own Roomful of Teeth. Communities of insiders rely on boundaries that also exclude, and the work has faced criticisms of cultural appropriation, most famously in 2019 from the Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. This study problematises the sense of joy that this piece excites in the body of the white listener—joy created in the absence of bodies of marginalised musicians.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2033565
Yati Durant
In 1997, New York University presented George Crumb’s composition Vox Balaenae (1971) for electric flute, cello and amplified piano at an on-campus performance, preceded by a talk with the composer. This was my first personal interaction with Crumb and his musical style and thought. It was also the beginning of a twenty-four-year influence that he and his music has had on my musical development. During the talk with Crumb, audience members were invited to ask him questions about his technique. I raised my hand and asked for his thoughts on improvisation: ‘What is your opinion regarding the use of improvisation in your concert works?’. As an improvisor and composer, unfamiliar with Crumb’s liberal style of sophisticated notation at that time, my impression was that much of Vox Balaenae’s character must have been at least informed by improvisational practice. With its amorphous metres and unpredictable patterns, Vox Balaenae sounded to me in performance almost like a jazz piece! However, George Crumb responded to my question by stating that he believed that there really isn’t any specific need for improvisation or aleatory in this work and that all of these techniques work just fine as notated music within the score. To me, his observation was just as intriguing as it was paradoxical. How could such a spontaneous music restrict itself to notational conventions? What aspects of performance practice were needed to successfully interpret George Crumb’s music that could make it seem like an improvisation? What kind of music notation could create this sort of effect? Contemporary Western musical notation is an incredibly complex language with thousands of graphic symbols, geometric and symmetrical functions, and a highly Contemporary Music Review, 2022 Vol. 41, No. 1, 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2022.2033565
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2033572
Marilyn Nonken
The reception of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I and II benefited from the efforts of pianists David Burge and Robert Miller. Burge, the composer’s colleague at Colorado College, gave the premiere of the first volume and made its first recording. The second volume was premiered by Robert Miller, a New York-based pianist associated with the Group for Contemporary Music, who created the initial recording of the second volume. The discographies of these two pianists testify to their tremendous and shared commitment to the music of their own time. Yet two artists drawn to the same repertoire, born in the same year, could not have been more different. There were significant differences in how they saw their goals, priorities, and responsibilities as interpreters dedicated to the evolving repertoire, which determined their immediate impact and the consequences of their work. Their choices, which reflect needs for access, self-preservation, education, standards, and audience engagement, are examined in light of contemporary debates regarding access and the bridging and bonding of diverse communities.
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