The document discusses various forms of musical notation from traditional Western notation to experimental graphic scores and electronic music notation, highlighting innovations that expanded notation to better represent new musical styles and technologies over time. Examples include graphic scores by Cage, Brown, and Xenakis, as well as early electronic music notation systems and the minimalist scores of Steve Reich.

1. nu notation and
minimalism
David Black
1

2. “Traditional Notation” through the ages
2

3. Traditional Notation
• Biased towards pitch and notes
• Limited to equal-tempered pitch, pulsed rhythms
• Limited representation of timbre
3
Criticisms of Common Music Notation (CMN) – page 726
•! Most western music between 1600 and 1900 uses common music notation
•! Much music falls outside usability of CMN
•! Biased towards pitch and duration of notes
•! Limited to equal-temperament, pulsed rhythms, and fractional durations of
notes
•! Few provisions for representation of timbre
• Improvised music is hard to put into terms of CMN

4. Traditional Notation
• No spatial trajectories
• Single-note events dominate
• Synthesis parameters/computer music is unsuitable
• Inefficient at describing sounds
• Not for use in computer/electronic music
4

5. Hebrew Cantillation
Gregorian Chant
5
Hebrew Cantillation - gave instructions to singer as to how to shape the melodic
structure, but weren’t specific notes.
Gregorian Chant - Gave way to common music notation with eventual staff (lines)
structure and dot note heads.

6. Chinese Qin Notation (500 C.E.)
6
• Chinese Qin Notation
o Didn’t say what was played
o Only gave finger positions, stroke techniques, tuning, perhaps similar to
guitar tablature.

7. Guidonian Hand (< ~1000. C.E.)
7
• Mnemonic Hand of Guido of Arezzo
o Helped with sight singing
o Joints of hand used to train hexachords (whole note scale) and solfege
(do-re-mi... note names)

8. Chopin, Prelude in A
Op. 28, No. 7
8
• Chopin Prelude (example of established notation as we know it)

9. J.S. Bach - Gott sei uns gnädig und barmherzig
(BWV 323) - 1725
9
• Example of relationship between “piano roll” visualization and musical
score

10. Claude Debussy - Clair de Lune - 1903
visualized using Music Animation Machine
10
Extended piano roll concept, brought to you by the “Music Animation Machine”:
video here:
http://www.vimeo.com/90612

11. Harp Notation
11
Seven pedals set the strings of the hard to many possible chromatic harmonies,
making glissandi and chord playing easier. Example of common music notation
adapted to new instruments (the chromatic harp)

12. New Notation
• Aid composer in visualizing composition
• Sound parameters/sound synthesis
• Give instructions to musicians for performance
• Can be used as documentation for the piece itself
• Useful for new/electronic/computer music
12

13. Jazz Lead Sheet - Giant Steps (John Coltrane)
13
Example of “lead sheet” - common in jazz, which gives the melody and chord
structure with which the performers improvise.

14. Solo Transcription - Giant Steps (John Coltrane)
14
This sheet continues where the previous slide leaves off - the improvised
saxophone solo of John Coltrane, transcribed form the recorded material, which
follows the chord structure presented.

15. Pictograph Notation - Gardner Read, 1998
15
Updated notation possibilities invented by Gardner Read, from his book available
here:
http://www.amazon.com/Pictographic-Score-Notation-Gardner-Read/dp/
0313304696
These are meant, like the harp notation, to adapt common music notation to new
instruments

16. "A Composer who hears sounds will try to find a notation for sounds. One who
has ideas will find one that expresses his ideas, leaving their interpretation free, in
confidence that his ideas have been accurately and concisely notated."
Cornelius Cardew - Treatise - 1963-1967
16
• Graphical score that allows for some improvisation, where performers
devise their own methods for interpreting the score
More resources, recordings, and video here:
http://www.spiralcage.com/improvMeeting/treatise.html

17. "The notation is more important than the sound. Not the exactitude and
success with which a notation notates a sound; but the musicalness of the
notation in its notating."
Cornelius Cardew - Treatise - 1963-1967
17
• The instructions were a guide which focused each individual's creative
instinct on a problem to be solved - how to interpret a particular system of
notation using one's own musical background and attitudes.
Animation
http://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/picturesofmusic/pages/anim.html

18. "Remember that space does not correspond literally to time."
Cornelius Cardew - Treatise - 1963-1967
18
• Not supposed to be played spontaneously, but practiced as a set of explicit
instructions

19. Text
"Performance advice. Divide the musicians into those involved in dot events (percussionists
and pianists?) and those involved in line events. Dot events to be exclusively soft."
Cornelius Cardew - Treatise - 1963-1967
19

20. George Crumb - Makrokosmos - 1972/1973
”an all-inclusive technical work for piano [using] all conceivable techniques”
20
• For amplified piano, uses extended techniques such as string piano
methods (such as playing the inside of the piano with the hands)
• Made to explore possibilites of piano
• Like cage, put objects in strings, modified instrument itself, but objects are
moved (!) during performance

21. SYMBOLS USED:
B—Bell-line sounds
S—Skin Instruments
C—Cymbal
G—Gong
T—Bell-line sounds
T.R.—Skin Instruments
!—Triangle
G.R.—Gong Roll
Morton Feldman - The King of Denmark - 1965
21
• For various percussion instruments, uses a grid-like notation with symbols
for instruments
• Played very softly using only hands and fingers, concerned with delicacy
and luminosity, taking the essential mallets out of the percussionists’
hands
• Graph: how many sounds to be played per beat, and whether high,
medium, or low pitch

22. Earle Brown - December 1952
Vocal rendition
22
• Associated with Cage, Morton Feldman
• December 1952 – “open form scoring”
o “Activity” rather than piece of music
o Horizontal and vertical lines of various widths
o Role of performer is to interpret score and translate graphical
information to music
o Brown says to consider this 2D space with time and move through it in
3 dimensions

23. Earle Brown - December 1952
Electronic rendition
23

24. My first impulse is to work in scoring and performance
processes both of which are represented in the score
December 1952.... I was first moved to think about such
things by observing mobiles of Alexander Kolger and the
very spontaenous painting techniques of Jackson Pollock.
Both of these things I vaguely remember becoming aware
of in boston, mass in 1948 or 49, and i had very much the
impluse to do something in “our kind of music” which
would have to do with this highly spontaneous performing
attitude, improvisational attitude that is, from a score
which had many multiple possibilities of interpretation.
Earle Brown - On December 1952
24
“Having nothing to do directly (or does it?) with the jazz background, my
primary aesthetic influences were the spontaneity, direct contact, the
“now-ness,” and the in-the-moment immediacy of the abstract
expressionist painters— especially the “improvisational” techniques of
Jackson Pollock and the subtle coloristic effects of Philip Guston and Bill
deKooning. More than anything, in terms of Cross Sections and many
other works of mine, it was the example of the mobiles of Alexander
Calder.“
Earle Brown interview: “On December 1952”
http://earle-brown.org/archive.focus.php?id=726

25. Earle Brown - Cross Sections and Color Fields - 1975
“You can’t grow up in America and not
have a connection to folk, jazz, or rock”
25
“As a young trumpet-playing jazz musician in the 1940s and ’50s, I
played in “territory” Big Bands, and I very much admired the Big Band
energy and sonorities of the Stan Kenton orchestra and its composers
and arrangers. (Morton Feldman called me “the lone arranger.”) Cross
Sections and Color Fields is in no way an attempt to imitate or extend
these concepts—they already went further than I do here—but to be a
kind of gentle “homage” to that world that I enjoyed so much....”

26. Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis (1954)
26
• First major work
• Inspired by the Einsteinian view of time and his memories of sounds of
warfare
• 61 players, with no players playing the same part
• Uses sound masses with many glissandi, dominated by strings
• Although it uses sound masses and graphical notation, individual parts are
still written in standard notation, leaving nothing to the performer’s
discretion
Score video with follow-along bar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI

27. Electronic Music Notation
27

28. Goffredo Haus - EMPS system - 1983
Melody/Harmony
Sound Analysis/Printing
28
• Transcribes sound of computer-synthesized music into a reading score by
means of sound analysis.
• Graphic notation registers sound as different symbols
• Amplitudes are plotted as histograms

29. Unité Polyagogie Informatic (UPIC) de CEMAMu
Xenakis, 1977
29
• Unite Polyagogie Informatic de CEMAMU (Centre d'Etudes de
Mathematiques et Automatiques Musicales/Center for Studies in
Mathematics and Automated Music)
• Flexible user interface with a score page and a sound structure page
• Wave envelopes could be drawn, as well as event information in the XY
plotter
• Realtime UPIC was available by 1991
• Could use samples in many different ways, such as banks of digital
oscillators

30. Iannis Xenakis - Mycenae Alpha - 1978
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• For mono tape, projected onto either of two or four sound sources around
the listening room
Score video with follow-along bar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yztoaNakKok

31. John Cage - Fontana Mix - 1958
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• for any number of tracks of magnetic tape or any number of players
playing any number of kinds of instruments
o 10 sheets of paper and 12 transparencies with randomly distributed
points
o Performer superimposes these to create a structure of curved lines,
dots, etc

32. John Cage - Williams Mix - 1952
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o Used “found” samples much like Fontana mix.
o The score denotes cutting and splicing tape to create a final mix

33. Kees Tazelaar - Geoglyphs - 1999
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o Tendency masking in voltage control
o Random signal masking - defines “range” of random output
Artis’s homepage:
http://www.keestazelaar.com/

34. Kees Tazelaar - Pier en Oceaan - 2002
34
o The used sound material was organized into five main groups, that each
were subdivided into the categories Tone-attacks, Tone-fields, Noise-
attacks and Noise Fields.

35. György Ligeti - Artikulation - 1958
35
• Combination of graphical pictographic notation and abstract synthesis
mapping
• Studio of Electronic Music of the West German Radio in Cologne
• Combination of tape and generated sound

36. György Ligeti - Artikulation - 1958
36
• Visualization by Rainer Wehinger
o The piece is called ‘Artikulation’ because in this sense an artificial
language is articulated: question and answer, high and low voices,
polyglot speaking and interruptions, impulsive outbreaks and humor,
charring and whispering.
Wehinger score with follow-along bar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71hNl_skTZQ

37. Han-Cristoph Steiner - Solitude - 2004
37
Another example of “notation” for electronic music, which uses PureData (PD)
data structures to visually represent rapidly morphing textures and data masks.
Each color represents a different sample, and each sample has two arrays: one for
playback, and one for amplitude and panning.
Artist’s homepage:
http://at.or.at/hans/solitude/

38. Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kontakte - 1960
38
o Piece for four loudspeakers, electronic sounds, piano, and percussion
o Tried to achieve total serialism, controlling pitch, timbre, intensity, and
duration of all aspects of the music
o Used spatialization between the four speakers
One rendition of the piece by David Tudor, Gottfried Koenig, and Cristoph
Caskel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvpesmJzQws&feature=related

39. Karlheinz Stockhausen - Helikopter Streichquartett - 1994
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o For four helicopter with pilots and sound technicians, four television
transmitter, 12 sound transmitters, and auditorium with four columns of
televisions and loudspeakers, a sound technician with mixing desk and
moderator, and a string quartet.
o Colored score is to represent the four musicians

40. Karlheinz Stockhausen
-
Spiral - 1994
40
o Events appearing on short wave radio give the soloist instructions for
performance, which can be on any instrument

41. Pedro Gomez-Egana - clark nova - 2006
41
• “Clark Nova” – British Music Information Center Cutting Edge Series
Video of the artwork:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlVDPF_-s5k

42. Minimalism of Steve Reich
42
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6209213

43. Clapping Music - 1972
43
One performer claps same rhythm for entire piece, the other performer shifts the
pattern one note every 8 or 12 bars.
Reich wanted to “create a piece of music that needed no instruments beyond the
human body”
Video of the performance with two clappers:
http://www.stevereich.com/multimedia/clappingMedProg.html
Video of jugglers (!!!) performing the piece:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXhBti625_s (jugglers performing !!!)

44. Clapping Music - 1972
44

45. Come Out - 1966
45
"I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to
show them"
About the Harlem Riot in New York City in 1964. This recorded quote of one of the
accused boys is used as source material, which uses Reich’s famous phase shifting
technique.
More and more voices are added until there are eight voices in total.

46. Different Trains - 1988
46
• First classical work to use digital sampling keyboard (Casio FZ-1)
Inherent melodies in spoken texts are transcribed and written out for
orchestral instruments and played back
Follows Reich’s memories before, during and after World War II

47. Violin Phase - 1967
47
Temporal variations created with the performance of two violins.
The recordings slowly go out of sync with each other.
This process repeats throughout the piece.
Can be played live by very determined and focused players

48. Electric Guitar Phase - 2001
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Played by Dominic Frasca, similar to Violin Phase

49. Music for 18 Musicians -
Let’s take a step backwards into Western tradition...Let’s
recover my birthright ... Let’s start the whole piece with a cycle
of harmony ... Lets bring in strings! Let’s bring in woodwinds -
they go very well with the human voice!
49
• Barely noticeable voices
• Can’t actually only use 18 musicians, they would get too tired!
• Explored what happens in absence of many melodic changes