INTRODUCTION
From the perspective of the listener, the radical experiments with notational schemas in the 1950s and 1960s by composers such as Wolff, Brown, Stockhausen, Haubenstock-Ramati, Cardew, and Cage, typically remained in the background. The innovative approaches to musical form and the performance challenges presented by the musical notation adopted in works such as Wolff's Edges, Cage's Cartridge Music, or Brown's December 1952, were only ever manifest in an aural space. In sharp contrast, in a growing body of contemporary performance practice, the score has been radically foregrounded, visually projected or otherwise displayed for an audience and offering not only an enriched aesthetic experience, but an opportunity for the listener to develop a deeper understanding of the processes and structures underlying a musical work or performance.
Like their traditional print-media counterparts, projected scores showcase a diverse range of approaches to the use of notation. As these are often generated by computer, however, they often feature information which is dynamically updated or transformed during a live performance. Many also integrate non-linear processes within these generative processes. In Nicolas Collins's Roomtone Variations (2013), for example, a series of pitches displayed for an ensemble varies with respect to the resonant tones of the performance space, while in Jason Freeman's Shadows (2015), for piano and computer, the displayed score is modified in response to the live interpretation of the pianist,Footnote 1 requiring the performer to engage in a type of extreme sightreading.Footnote 2
Projected scores need not adopt common practice notation,Footnote 3 nor do they necessarily need to be generated by computer. Jobina Tinnemans’ panoramic scores,Footnote 4 for example, feature hand drawn graphic notation presented on printed media spanning an entire performance space. In her Imagiro Landmannalaugar (2017) for small ensemble, for example, the score spans over 20-metres in length, requiring performers to physically navigate through the performance space as they read the score (see Figure 1)
Figure 1: Still image from a performance of Jobina Tinnemans’ Imagiro Landmannalaugar (2017). Image included by kind permission of Jobina Tinnemans.
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Projected scores also need not be prescriptive in nature. Live coding performances, for example, often routinely display programming script edited by performers in real-time which outline the processes, albeit in highly coded form, that shape a musical structure. But even live coding performances need not feature programming script, in some respects the code equivalent of common practice notation, as evidenced in Thor Magnusson's Threnoscope,Footnote 5 a live coding instrument with a unique graphic interface which is used for the instantiation and transformation of drone-based algorithmic processes, see Figure 2.
Figure 2: Graphic interface for Thor Magnusson's Threnoscope. Image included by kind permission of Thor Magnusson.
Irrespective of the type of notational schema projected or the motivation for projecting it,Footnote 6 the overt display of the score reframes the listening experience in distinctly unique ways. Does such a foregrounding necessarily promote a deeper structural understanding of a musical work or underlying performance processes? Might not the inherent decoding process inhibit such an understanding? How might the visual design or temporal modality of a dynamic score support this understanding? To better address these questions, a useful starting point is to consider how the visual design constraints of scores created on screens and intended for projection affect the ways in which composers articulate musical forms.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND CONSTRAINTS
Projected scores are uniquely bound by several principles of visual design which frame the way in which performers and listeners engage with the work and musical processes they denote.Footnote 7 For those scores which are prescriptive in nature, these principles in turn facilitate certain modes of musical expression while inhibiting others.
Despite the obvious advantages of common practice notation, not least of which is its widespread familiarity, its informational density makes it not particularly well suited for visual projection, one of the reasons, perhaps, why graphic notation is frequently used in this practice. This problem is exacerbated further when multiple parts are embedded within a page. As a result, when common practice notation is projected for performers to interpret, it tends to operate within unique constraints – rhythmic complexity is avoided, pitch selections are often confined to smaller registral tessituras, and traditional expressive indications whether denoted by symbols or text are minimized.
While page turns are somewhat of an anachronism in projected scores, the constrained spatial area of a display has seen composers adopt a range of animation techniques in order to present performers with new musical information.Footnote 8 Cat Hope's screen scores, for example, often employ scrolling techniques to display new information to an ensemble, directly correlating the display methodology to the drone-based forms that underlie much of her work.Footnote 9 In Longing (2013), for example, the score is presented to each member of the ensemble on networked iPad displays and also projected for the audience. The performers are presented with a small display window that slowly scrolls from left to right across a master score image (see Figure 3a).Footnote 10 Scrolling need not adopt the familiar left-to-right paradigm, as evidenced in Hope and Vickery's The Talking Board (2011), in which various coloured circles (planchettes) drift across a master image, framing new information to be interpreted by the performers (see Figure 3b).
Figure 3: (a) Windowed image as presented to performers from the master score of Cat Hope's Longing (2013) and (b) Still image from Cat Hope and Lindsay Vickery's The Talking Board (2011). Images included by kind permission of Cat Hope and Lindsay Vickery.
New musical information can also be embedded within a single display through the animation of notational descriptors. In Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir's Esoteric Mass (2014) for 16 wind instruments, for example, notes are denoted by circles of light which orbit along concentric rings projected onto the floor of the performance space around which the performers stand (see Figure 4a). The duration of notes is correlated to the speed at which the circles orbit. I adopt a similar method of embedding information within a display frame in my point studies no. 6 for string quartet where rotating nodes, radials and arcs denote various natural harmonics to be performed by members of the quartet with colour used as a means of denoting string and harmonic numbers (see Figure 4b).
Figure 4: (a) Still image taken by Henrik Beck/nyMusikk from a performance at nyMusikk's Only Connect festival of Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir's Esoteric Mass (2014) (b) Still image from the score for David Kim-Boyle's point studies no. 6 (2016) (right). Image included by kind permission of Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir and Henrik Beck/nyMusikk.
Animated event descriptors can also be combined with traditional notation in a hybrid form. In Ryan Ross Smith's Study No. 10 (2013) and Ingibjörg Fríðriksdóttir's Right is Wrong (2013), both for solo piano, only one grand stave is displayed, addressing the information density weakness of common practice notation, with discrete pitches scrolled across the display from right-to-left (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Still images from the scores for (a) Ryan Ross Smith's Study No. 10 (2013), and (b) Ingibjörg Fríðriksdóttir's Right is Wrong (2013). Images included by kind permission of Ryan Ross Smith and Ingibjörg Fríðriksdóttir.
Irrespective of the type of animation adopted, the speed of dynamic change is constrained by the inability of the eye to accurately track rapid visual transitions, especially when that information is distributed over a large spatial area.Footnote 11 Visual information is never animated at a speed greater than that which it can be accurately tracked by the performers, unless the failure of accurate tracking happens to be of aesthetic importance as in the case of a work such as Lindsay Vickery's Escadaria do Diablo (2017) where the performer faces the challenge of reading a score in which notation randomly disappears. In order to facilitate the accurate tracking of animated descriptors, many projected scores are designed such that the field of vision of the performers is deliberately constrained, much in the same way as the performer reading common practice notation linearly interprets a relatively small area of information.Footnote 12 In both Hope's Longing and Smith's Study No. 10, for example, a virtual playhead which in Hope's work also functions as a means of synchronising non-linear processes, directs attention to a small area of the score. Similarly, in The Talking Board, the coloured planchettes constrain the notational information to be interpreted to a very small area. In Smith's Study 22 for 24 percussionists, despite the wealth of graphic information displayed, each of the percussionists focuses on intersections of individual graphic primitives within a very narrow area rather than monitoring intersections across all 24 moving primitives (see Figure 6). For the listener viewing the score of such a work, observing the correlations between discrete parts will be somewhat easier, as they are absolved of the need to monitor a small visual area.
Figure 6: Score excerpt from Ryan Ross Smith's Study No. 22 (2013) for 24 percussionists. Image included by kind permission of Ryan Ross Smith.
Colour assumes a more constructive role in scores generated by computer and projected in performance.Footnote 13 It can be used to help distinguish different parts within an ensemble piece, as seen in Cat Hope's Longing, or mark different dynamic levels of individual notes as in Ingibjörg Fríðriksdóttir's Right is Wrong for solo piano (see Figure 5). Along with other text-formatting parameters, colour is also an inherent feature of programming script, used to facilitate accurate and rapid editing, a particularly necessary feature in live coding performances.Footnote 14
While colour has a purely functional role when used as a means of distinguishing or denoting musical information in a notational script and results in a correspondingly constrained range of colours employed, colour sometimes has an undeniable aesthetic importance in scores designed for projection. In Marina Rosenfeld's WHITE LINES (2003–), for example, a pair of parallel white lines is superimposed on a series of short colour video projections. The lines vary in width and opacity, with performers mapping those variations to musical parameters. While colour certainly has a functional role in helping distinguish the white lines from the background image, it also has a fundamental aesthetic value in drawing attention to concepts of stasis and becoming.Footnote 15
The musical processes denoted by the projected score are clearly conditioned by these and various other principles of visual design and organisation. And while the ability of the projected score to contribute to a deep structural understanding of a work may be open to conjecture,Footnote 16 the foregrounding of the score nevertheless invites the listener to enter into a decoding process to support a better understanding of the musical and performance processes underlying the work itself.Footnote 17
DECODING
to listen is to adopt an attitude of decoding what is obscure, blurred, or mute, in order to make available to consciousness the ‘underside’ of meaningFootnote 18
In his influential 1986 essay ‘Listening’, Roland Barthes identified three ways in which sound can provide meaning: firstly through acting as an indice and thus providing a means of orientation, secondly through acting as a sign and functioning in a semiotic mode, and thirdly through functioning as a shimmering of signifiers that draws attention to what is unsaid. Barthes associates the third mode of listening with that of the experience of listening to the work of experimental composers such as John Cage, where awareness is brought to the verticality of sound rather than its syntagmatic extension. While in many respects Barthes modes are woefully general,Footnote 19 they do provide a useful framework for helping to understand the experience of listening to musical works the scores of which are visible to the audience.
As noted, through the foregrounding of the score, listeners are invited to engage in a deciphering process to help understand the musical processes to which they are attending. In Rosenfeld's WHITE LINES this deciphering is even encouraged when the notation is exhibited in non-concert settings.Footnote 20 All this despite Barthes assertion that we do not listen to music in a deciphering sense. To explore the process of deciphering a little more, consider the three notations with an equivalent sounded result which might be presented in a hypothetical performance situation (see Figure 8).
Figure 7: Still image from a performance of Marina Rosenfeld's WHITE LINES (2003–). Image included by kind permission of Marina Rosenfeld.
Figure 8: Three notations producing the same sounded result: (a) common practice notation, (b) graphic notation, (c) Supercollider programming script.
Even for listeners unable to read music notation, given its widespread general familiarity it is reasonably safe to assume that they will associate each note symbol of (a) with a particular pitch that varies with respect to the position of the note-head on the stave, and develop an understanding that the beaming of these notes denotes a rhythmic pattern. Now consider the second example. Again, assuming the same sounded result, a listener will likely assume that notes are represented by nodes with pitch denoted by node colour and rhythmic organisation denoted by spatial distribution. The efficiency with which variations in spatial height (a) or colour (b) can be mapped to a particular pitch is not of concern at this time although it should be noted that (a) perhaps better represents the relative changes in pitch across the phrase. In any event, the relationship between the notational schemas of (a) and (b) and the sounded result is unambiguous and in the semiotic tradition both notations would be said to be denotative signifieds. The third example by contrast is, despite its intrinsic simplicity, the most highly codified of the three and would arguably require a fundamental knowledge of programming syntax to understand the relationship between what is presented and its sounded output. While one cannot point to a direct one-to-one relationship between sign and signified, and while each part of the code exists within a complex chain of meaning, for a competent Supercollider programmer, the relationship between the programming script and the sounded result may conceivably be more easily decoded than that of (a). Clearly, in all three examples, understanding the relationship between the notational schema presented and the sounded result involves developing fluency in a particular referential code.Footnote 21
It does not necessarily follow that simply understanding a referential code or syntactic structure of a notational schema allows a listener to more easily draw associative relationships across sensory modalities. This is particularly the case when various non-linear processes are embedded within a musical form. Consider a variation of the previous three examples (Figure 9).
Figure 9: Non-linearity embedded within (a) common practice notation, (b) graphic notation, (c) Supercollider programming script.
When presented with notations (a) or (b), a listener will likely continue to ascribe denotative relationships between note symbols (a) or spherical nodes (b) and pitches, but as that relationship cannot be unambiguously determined given the non-linear sequence of pitches, the notation is seen more to denote a prescriptive process rather than describe a particular sounded result. While it maintains a referential function, it also begins to assume a more poetic one.Footnote 22
Despite the non-linear process embedded within Figure 9 (c), it maintains the same complex association of referential functions as that of Figure 8 (c) and as such, the listener response is unlikely to be greatly dissimilar. It requires much the same knowledge of programming code and syntax to properly understand its relationship to a sounded result and, to that end, continues to be framed as a description of a process rather than a particular musical outcome per se.
The referential function of notational schemas is made somewhat easier to decode through the use of animation techniques in certain generative scores to denote the onset of particular note events. In Smith's Study No. 22 (Figure 6) or Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir's Esoteric Mass (Figure 4a), it is not difficult for the listener to perceive that the collision of graphic primitives in the former work, or the intersection of moving circles with the spatial location of performers in the latter, corresponds to the articulation of note events. Similarly in scrolling scores which employ a playhead paradigm such as Cat Hope's Longing (Figure 3a), or Ingibjörg Fríðriksdóttir's Right is Wrong (Figure 5), the relationship of graphic shapes to relative pitch is easily decoded through observance of the vertical point of intersection of the shape with the playhead. In each of these four pieces, the referential functions of the notation employed are facilitated through the manner of their temporal unfolding.
Somewhat counterintuitively, perhaps, the referential function of notation can also be suggested through an a priori physical relationship between the performer and the visually presented score. This relationship is at the core of Snæbjörnsdóttir's Esoteric Mass, where the score is physically embodied within the performance space, but it is also explored in Jobina Tinnemans’ Imagiro Landmannalaugar (Figure 1), where the decoding process is facilitated through the manner in which the performers choreograph their movement through the performance space in order to be able to read the 24-metre-long score.
As notational schemas become more complex, their various referential functions become more ambiguous and difficult to decode. In a work such as Lindsay Vickery's nature forms I (2014) for three instruments and electronics, for example, it is unlikely that the listener will be able to ascribe any referential function to the notation as these functions themselves are not semantically disjoint, with each of the three players interpreting the notation according to different rules (see Figure 10). Clearly, in a work such as this, the poetic function of the notational schema assumes as much importance as any referential one. Nelson Goodman goes even further, claiming that a variable compliance relationship such as this fails to meet the semantic requirements of a notational schema, i.e. it is not semantically disjoint, and can therefore no longer be considered to be a notation at all.Footnote 23
Figure 10: Excerpt from the score for Lindsay Vickery's nature forms I (2014). Image included by kind permission of Lindsay Vickery.
Despite the inherent difficulties inherent in the decoding process, it does not necessarily follow that the inability to unambiguously ascertain referential relationships between image and sound prevents the listener from developing a deeper understanding of a musical work, just as it does not necessarily follow that someone who can fluently read common practice notation automatically has a deep understanding of traditionally notated works. Somewhat ironically perhaps, this supports Barthes original assertion that we do not listen to music by way of deciphering,Footnote 24 despite the overt invitation to do so through the foregrounding of the score. While Barthes argues for a vertical signifying in his third mode of listening, which he contends is the manner of listening encouraged by the contemporary art music tradition of the early 1970s, he does not explore in great depth the temporality of the listening process. I would argue that the temporal modality of scores foregrounded through projection presents perhaps the most interesting insights on how composers working in this area of practice frame listener engagement with the work.Footnote 25
TEMPORAL MODALITY
The projected score encourages an engagement with procedural relationships as they temporally unfold in the score and are musically sounded in the performance space.Footnote 26 While this engagement is to a certain extent more easily recognised in those scores that employ various animation techniques, it is also strongly featured in scores such as Tinnemans’ Imagiro Landmannalaugar, where sounds’ becoming is underscored through the evolving physical relationship between the body of the performer and the materiality of the score. For those scores that do feature the animation of notational descriptors, the animation techniques employed ground the work in a particular temporal modality which fundamentally frame listener engagement.
In her critique of structural listening, Rose Subotnik argues that musical style ‘defines the conditions for actual structural possibilities, and that structure is perceived as a function of style more than as its foundation’.Footnote 27 This observation is particularly manifest in the temporal modality of projected scores. In Hope's Longing or Tinnemans’ Imagiro Landmannalaugar, for example, the drone-based flow of musical texture is strongly supported and musically reinforced by the scrolling model adopted in the display of musical information as well as the overt use of horizontal, graphic lines in the score. Similarly, in many of Ryan Ross Smith's works for percussion, such as Study No. 22 (Figure 6), the gradual acceleration and deceleration of sonic events which results in complex rhythmic textures is strongly supported by the manner in which sonic events are represented in the score through the collision of graphic primitives. It is hard to imagine the processes employed would be as transparent for the listener if sonic events were represented through a scroll-based score. In Marina Rosenfeld's WHITE LINES, the becoming of musical processes is strongly reinforced by the concurrent dissolution of the white lines in the score through variations in visual opacity. In all of these works, the temporal modality of the score underpins formal musical structure.
The mnemonic function of notation is extended in the projected score such that it serves as an aide-memoire not only for the performers but for the audience,Footnote 28 providing the visual support to relate current events to past but also to better anticipate how future events might unfold. In non-linear forms, open forms, or in visual scripts where denotative relationships cannot be unambiguously determined, this anticipatory function is fundamentally unique.Footnote 29 As a live coder edits the parameters of an iterative loop, for example, a listener reasonably cognisant of programming structure can anticipate sonic outcomes. Similarly, as a scrolling score unfolds, transitions from one sonic texture to another can be anticipated even though denotative relationships between graphic typographies and sounded results are not strictly unambiguous. Cat Hope has indicated that the ability of the listener to anticipate outcomes is one of the reasons she would rather an audience not see a score.Footnote 30
Through projection of the score, the audience is made aware of a field of structural possibilities that is typically closed with the navigation, decisions, and determinations that the performer/s make embedded as criteria for aesthetic reflection. This is in marked contrast to the experience of a seminal open-form work such as Stockhausen's Klavierstücke XI or Haubenstock-Ramati's Liaisons, in which the virtual pathways through the score remain closed for the listener. The projected score thus concretizes the work's protentive possibilities.Footnote 31
As non-linear processes become more deeply embedded in a notated script, the ability of the listener to anticipate or protend sonic outcomes becomes more difficult. Nevertheless, the foregrounding of the score presents the audience with all the work's latent and virtual possibilities,Footnote 32 not just those that are actualised. In the author's 64 × 4 × 4, see Figure 11 for example, the listener is presented with the entire field of possibilities that performers can take through the score although only one is sonically actualised. For the listener, the work becomes a field of potentiality ontologically defined as much by its latent possibilities as by those sounded.Footnote 33 These potentialities constantly shadow the work's actualisation, overtly foregrounding the process of production and entelechy.
Figure 11: Still images from the dynamic score for 64 × 4 × 4 (2017) for string quartet.
CONCLUSION
The visual presentation of the real-time score, whether that score be prescriptive or descriptive, invites listeners to engage in a decoding process to develop a deeper understanding of the musical processes underpinning a musical work. While this process can rarely be unambiguously undertaken, this ambiguity nevertheless results in perhaps the most ontologically significant outcome in which the latent possibilities visually presented but not necessarily actualised come to establish a world, in a Heideggerian sense, playfully disclosed through sonic realisation.Footnote 34 The tension between the actualisation of a world through sonic becoming, sound's haecceity,Footnote 35 and the historically mnemonic function of notation forms, perhaps, the locus of aesthetic interest in the practice.
Are the creative possibilities afforded by a reframed listening experience and its subsequent ontological effects somewhat tempered by a tendency to fetishise notational schemas? Might not the opportunity for an active, structural listening experience be diluted through presentation of notational schemas?Footnote 36 On the contrary, I would suggest that a notational schema affords an enriched engagement with a musical performance. Through a rich foregrounding of the score, with its typically inherent non-linearity and protentive suggestion of possibility, the listener is invited alongside the performer/s to playfully engage with a work's structural processes and in turn develop an intimate understanding of the world it explores.
