Steve Reich Music For 18 Musicians Score Pdf

[Jeremias Resendez]

welcometo issue #21 of \u201Ctusk is better than rumours,\u201D a newsletter featuring primers and album rankings of experimental and \u2018outsider\u2019 musicians. artist primers are published every other monday, and on off-weeks i publish a variety of articles ranging from label and genre primers to interviews to guest writers.

this week i\u2019m excited to present a piece by dr. eva moreda rodr\u00EDguez on experimental and avant-garde notation. moreda rodr\u00EDguez is a musicologist who focuses on the history of spanish music from the late 19th century to today. she has published two books on music and music criticism in francoist spain, Music and Exile in Francoist Spain (ashgate 2015) and Music Criticism and Music Critics in Early Francoist Spain (oxford university press 2017). she is also an accomplished novelist. i became aware of her, however, from her great twitter account, \u201Cmusical notation is beautiful,\u201D so i asked her to write about a few examples of creative and difficult scores. her selections will be of interest to \u201Ctusk is better\u201D readers, as they include luminaries like cornelius cardew, anthony braxton, and julius eastman.

For a few years I taught a two-lecture series on notation in an \u201CIntroduction to Music Studies\u201D class for first-year students. I remember that the bit on the notation of experimental and avant-garde music always resulted in the most passionate and interesting discussions. \u201CIs this notation?,\u201D I would ask students while projecting one of George Brecht\u2019s \u201CEvent scores\u201D on the screen (or, alternatively, Steve Reich\u2019s Pendulum Music or Yoko Ono\u2019s Voice Piece for Soprano) \u2013 snippets of text, sometimes written in a quizzical way, instructing the performers to do various things. \u201CIs this a score?,\u201D I would ask again when projecting Roman Haubenstock-Ramati\u2019s Alone (or Brian Eno\u2019s better-known Music for Airports) \u2013 which one would be forgiven to mistake for a piece of non-figurative art.

My students \u2013 like most of us schooled in the classical tradition \u2013 were bemused to be presented with scores without clear indications of what notes to play, how long to play them for or how to fit them into a rhythm. Yet, after discussion, we tended to find some ways in which these examples resembled aspects of other forms of notation we knew from earlier eras. Brecht, Reich and Ono, for example, in their own way, provide a set of instructions for performers \u2013 not unlike lute tablatures, which told you which fret you should put your finger on, but not which pitch you needed to play. As for Haubenstock-Ramati\u2019s and Eno\u2019s graphic scores, they act as a powerful reminder that, across the centuries, traditional notation was not always simply functional, but it often included too a significant visual component \u2013 for example, in the work of the late medieval composers collectively known as Ars Subtilior; here, scores were sometimes drawn in playful shapes, such as a harp or a heart.

In these discussions with my students, we found in the music of the past a gateway that helped us make sense of some of the wildly imaginative, innovative and puzzling notations composers and performers started to experiment with from the 1950s onward. However, we should not underestimate the extent to which these experiments intended to break away from established forms of notation that composers were increasingly seeing as insufficient to pursue their creative vision. Over the course of several centuries, Western art music notation developed to be very good at giving precise indications of pitch and rhythm, but it remained more vague concerning other key elements of music such as timbre or the performer\u2019s contribution to materializing the piece. But \u2013 my students and I always ended up asking ourselves - what does a piece with no set pitch or rhythm \u201Csound\u201D like? And \u2013 perhaps equally importantly \u2013 what does it look like?

In exploring these questions, some composers took a relatively controlled approach \u2013 such as Anestis Logothetis, a Greek composer who developed most of his career in Austria from the 1950s onwards, with connections to the Darmstadt music courses, the electronic studio of West German Radio (WDR), John Cage and other key names of the nascent avant-garde musical scene. Logothetis\u2019 graphic scores consist of a number of discrete elements, to each of which is attributed a meaning by the composer \u2013 for example, whether pitch should be high or low; which dynamics should be implemented; whether the sound should have any specific timbral quality or use an extended technique. Still, performers, in interpreting the combination of signs that constituted the score, would have a considerable degree of freedom in choosing which exact pitches to play, for how long to stay in a certain range or timbre, or how to respond to each other.

\u201CBut then, doesn\u2019t this mean that you can play whatever?\u201D That\u2019s another of the questions my students would often ask in these debates on notation. Yes and no \u2013 in fact, one of the reasons why composers were attracted to these kinds of notations was that they gave increased agency to performers in the shaping of the piece and that they opened up avenues for collaboration and co-creating, rather than the performer simply sticking to the pitches and note values on the page. Consider, for example, Cornelius Cardew\u2019s Treatise \u2013 a 193-page score composed of shapes and symbols; at the bottom of each page, a five-line staff runs throughout the entire work, as if to remind us silently that this is music and not some kind of visual art experiment. Unlike Logothetis, Cardew \u2013 a British native who then renounced the avant-garde in favor of more politically committed forms of music - did not give any precise instructions to performers or drew up a code to decipher his score. He did not even indicate how many performers or which instruments should be included, or how long the piece should last. However, Treatise is not a \u201Cfree for all,\u201D and Cardew expected performers to agree beforehand on how signs should be interpreted in performance. Logically, this has resulted in wildly different interpretations (\u201Crealizations\u201D) of the score. Questions that me and my students explored together inspired by Cardew\u2019s score included: in what sense can we regard these as performances of the same work, given that we wouldn\u2019t be able to identify them as such if we didn\u2019t know all of them had resulted from the same score? And how does this redefine the role of composers and performers in co-creating a piece of music?

Cardew only went as far as printing a running five-line staff on the bottom of each page of the score to remind us that this is a score to be performed. Other composers, however, kept some elements of traditional music notation in their scores while exploring ways to make them more open and less deterministic \u2013 such as American composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton, who worked mostly in the domain of free jazz (indeed, another question that these scores pose is how stable is the boundary between classical music and other genres where improvisation was more firmly established). Like Logothetis, Braxton devised specific signs to denote certain effects or timbres (what he called \u201Csound classifications\u201D), including \u201Csmooth sounds\u201D, \u201Csoft sounds\u201D, \u201Csmeared sounds\u201D and \u201Csound beam.\u201D These, again, require considerable critical insight and involvement from performers in order for them to be fully realized. Some of Braxton\u2019s scores rely solely on such signs; others, instead, combine them with short snippets of musical notation. Performers are to base their improvisations on these notated short passages, while at the same time getting guidance from the signs and shapes surrounding them. For example, in Composition #76 Braxton uses colors to indicate mood, and shades of colors to indicate tempo and dynamics.

Composition #96, on the other hand, superimposes an orchestral score in conventional notation with a visual score consisting of religious symbols, such as the Christian cross and the star of David. These signs are not intended for the musicians, though, but for a photographer: she should, in advance of the performance, scout her environment in search of manifestations of these symbols in the natural world and photograph them; the photographs should then be synchronized with the performance of the orchestral score. Braxton\u2019s use of photography, incidentally, is an excellent example of how these graphic scores are often difficult to separate from the visual arts. Indeed, there are several other examples of creators who moved between one and the other seamlessly, questioning even the notion that a boundary existed between the two. Juan Hidalgo, who introduced John Cage\u2019s oeuvre and thinking in Spain, was active as both a composer and visual artist. German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven worked for a long time on her \u201CMathematical Music\u201D pieces: these consist of rows and columns of numbers, which can also be performed as actual pieces of music.

Composer, singer and overall genius Julius Eastman, on the other hand, stuck to recognizable signs from traditional music notation in some of his best-known pieces, such as Gay Guerrilla. On a conventional five-line staff, pitches are clearly given but note values and time signatures are not: most notes appear only as black heads, the same pitch repeated again and again eight or thirteen or twenty times in a row. Eastman offers some written guidance as to how to interpret the spread of notes on the page (\u201Cplay once on cue,\u201D \u201Cchords go together\u201D), as well as timings; however, performers still need to agree on a considerable number of aspects of the performance \u2013 how many performers will play, what instruments will they play, at what speed and dynamics. Interestingly, however, as Jeff Weston has pointed out, this freedom has not always been fully realized by performers: instead, home recordings of the pieces made or supervised by Eastman have often been used as the model from which new performances are crafted. Which leads to a new question, one more that my students and I explored without ever getting to a final answer: Can such recordings then act as a new score to be respected at all costs?

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