One of our aims for this new collaboration is to look at graphic scoring, visual documentation, interpretation and mapping of sound. We want to explore useful ways of having a record of the sounds we find and make in order to know what sort of ‘score’ to produce for the musicians and vocalists who will eventually perform works that emerge from this joint methodology.
We talked about the problems of representation and how ‘writing freezes the experience of temporal flux’ as well as thinking about the audience’s ‘wayward aural attentiveness during the sounding flow of music’ and that a score could be like a ‘bundle of conceptual tools’(D.Smalley) accessed equally by player and audience.
Claire has investigated improvising from a number of graphic scores, sometimes alone and a few in ensemble. Some scores seem to consistently create very specific sound worlds, and some much more in flux. Jane makes soundmaps using colour, mark and texture to record a soundscape but has never vocalised from them or had a musician play them. So Notations 21 – Theresa Sauer is a good place to start a collaborative enquiry, if you’ve not seen the book look online here: (http://www.notations21.net/) . It contains extremely different graphic scores. Claire chose one by Kerry John Andrews because ‘..it doesn’t have gestural flow’ ‘the colours played into it a lot in deciding where to start and what dynamics you’re using, pitch, sound..’ Jane was drawn to Morgan O’Hara’s ‘Live Transmission’ score for a megaphone, a complex, stimulating, series of tight pencil marks denoting some kind of spatial volume that Claire saw/heard as ‘throbbing’. http://www.morganohara.com/
Because a graphic score is open to interpretation and less ‘fixed’ than traditional notation each playing of it will be unique. As with all scores “the piece is not the score, the house is not the architect’s blueprint”, having less common language routes than traditional notation and involving much more of a process of ‘making’, interpretations can make for very different pieces.
Potentially anything can be a score, your face, the wall, a sink mat.
