collision detection: Scratching, bending, and musical scores

November 21, 2004

Scratching, bending, and musical scores

For hundreds of years, composers have argued over what's the best way to represent music on the page, and many have experimented with weird new modes of notation. But until I read a piece this week in the New York Times about the avante-garde performer Margaret Leng Tan, I'd never heard of George Crumb. Crumb is famous for drawing his scores in hallucinogenic shapes evocative of the mood he's trying to set, such as the spiral-shaped score for "Spiral Galaxy: Aquarius", pictured above. I wish more of his scores were online -- they're quite trippy to look at.

Music is, when you think about it, one of the strangest challenges in the field of information representation. Acoustic instruments can do all manner of subtle things: How do you accurately score the bend and vibrato of some of the notes in a B.B. King solo? DJing presents even more challenges: One of the coolest things I've ever seen is the booklet on how to musically score a sequence of scratches on a record -- the "Turntablist Transcription Method" produced in 2000 by a trio of DJs. (You can download the entire thing here in PDF form.)

Posted by Clive Thompson at November 21, 2004 04:16 PM

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Comments

Ah, Crumb. I have a letter he wrote to me once, about an invite to speak at Columbia. In that same ornate way that he writes his scores. He couldn't make it, but I'll never get a better looking "No". Now to dust of my old thrift store, professor-tweed jacket for a few comments.

Along with the graphic beauty of the scores, Crumb also makes use of a wide variety of extended techniques -- playing the instruments in unorthodox ways -- the old "superball on a stick that you rub across the body of the harp" trick sounds like a whale singing, for example. There were lots of avant-garde composers that attempted to add these kinds of sounds into their works from the mid-50s through the early 70s (surely driven by the explosion of new sounds and timbres from the electronic realm). Unfortunately, most composers failed at the real trick of incorporating these new sounds into a larger musical narrative, and not have these effects as isolated curiousity ("what the hell was that?"). In fact, for a lot of those guys, Crumb included, "narrative" means less about the traditional tension-release build up of music than the narrative included in the title or the program notes.

Graphic scores, where the traditional 5 lines and noteheads are often not used at all, was another big part of the 60s, where Cage, Cornelius Cardew and other hep-cats were experimenting with taking concert music more towards the adventurous edges of improvisation. Unfortunately, I can't find a lot of examples online -- but if anyone is interested, Googling on "graphic scores", gets some background, since I am not an expert on that topic at all.

For me, it was always more along the lines of making a clean, clear and very-detailed score that was "usable" at first glance, but rewarding with layers of specifics. While there are many different ways to tell a performer how to specifically approach an attack envelope and vibrato in 20th century music notation, it's unfortunately incredibly dense on the page, hard to read, and perhaps even harder to execute, since the performer is woefully aware of the expectations set by the composer. Nevermind the economic issue of weighing the cost of rehearsal time (and inivisible practice time) against larger performance issues.

To take Clive's example, I wouldn't want to dare notate a piece with millisecond details of the BB King's vibrato for a cellist, but would instead write "a' la BB King" over the bar and be done with it. A good cellist would enjoy doing a little research, and would probably play the note, tossing their head back with a sly smile while shaking it back and forth, and a wicked concave .34ms envelope to a max vibrato speed at 9 per second and a depth at a ratio of 1/3rd of a halfstep, and call their axe "Lucille". But it ain't easy to find a good cellist.

Posted by: jason at November 22, 2004 10:48 AM

Brilliant post, sir. Yes, of course, that's a great way around this dilemma -- use the "in the style of" notation and let the performers use their artistic sensibilities to do the rest. That's why they're performers, no?

Still, as you note, the Cagian debates around music notation are really damn interesting, merely as an information-representation problem.

Posted by: Clive at November 23, 2004 9:18 AM

Clive,

I knew I'd seen something like that score before, and it just dawned on me:
Labradford's second album, A Stable Reference [http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE47E17DD49AD7020C59F3864C5B567F307C84AF6821B6E4450C8A93547821F27B008A095CCB0E577B766ADFF2EA01607D9CEEC5CFFD4765D40&sql=10:azdfylkoxpcb]
has a similar score on the cover...kewl!
(if you're not familiar with this band, this is a good'un to start with, if you don't mind the occasional over-reverbed vocal drifting into your drone...)

Posted by: bud at November 23, 2004 8:46 PM

Clive,

Posted by: bud at November 23, 2004 8:54 PM

It occurs to me that perhaps we finally have a use for Flash. I can imagine an animated score in which the stuff that has passed disappears and only the next ten or so bars are visible at any one time (combined with some kind of metronomic guidance) could be really interesting, and since you wouldn't have to deal with the whole score at one go, you could evoke lots of sensation with movement and turning in on itself or spiralling around. If given to a conductor to use and create live it could be even more interesting.

Posted by: Tom Coates at November 26, 2004 2:26 PM

Bud -- excellent links!

Tom -- damn, that's a cool idea. Flash as a new way to score music!

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