Game Play and Gestalt: Analysing Christian Wolff’s Alternative Notation from the Performers’ Perspectives

ABSTRACT In his indeterminate works that he refers to as ‘alternatively notated scores’, Christian Wolff grants the performer decision-making powers. This notation includes symbols known as coordination neumes, which instruct the performers when to begin and end a sound event in relation to the sounds around them, and produce game play between performers. Scholars have discussed the interactive nature of Wolff’s scores but have not addressed the procedure of reading the notation in performance and how it impacts the game play inherent in these works. I argue that the most fruitful approaches indeterminate music is to examine the experience of performing pieces. Gestalt psychology’s Principles of Organisation offer one means of understanding these works from the performers’ perspectives. When applied to two of Wolff’s alternatively notated scores, For 5 or 10 Players and For 1, 2, or 3 People, as an analytical approach, Gestalt principles reveal a conflict between the temporal spacing that the notation’s visual elements imply and the temporal spacing in performance as a result of the pieces’ ludic nature. Uncovering these features adds a new dimension to the analytic discussion of Wolff’s music and furthers our understanding of the processes involved in performing his scores and indeterminate music.