Graphic Notation

Honestly, for the graphic notation project, I spent a long time simply thinking about how to make this work. After reading through several of the examples in class I discovered that there were many creative ways of going about making a piece with graphic notation.

There were times when I thought composers were just doing it to try and be published, without actually taking the time and energy to write a 'real' work of music. However, judging by their philosophies and ideology defending their works, I can understand why they wrote the music the way they did.

I became very interested in the idea of using something that I knew, something already in existence, to try and incorporate the idea that anything can be music. That strain of thought brought me around to the idea of chess and how Cage used a game to get close to Duchamp in the later years of his life, but I had no Duchamp. Then the idea of crosswords and puzzles struck me as unique in that they would leave so much to chance. However, the problem here was in determination. How does one incorporate every word, or every letter? It would take a lot of time, and a lot of thought. Then I thought of Sudoku.

This game is one I know pretty well, and I thought it would be easy enough to incorporate each of the nine numbers as it's own unit of sound. This brought me around to making each number have it's own separate identity. The ideas came to me all at once now. Each performer could have his own pitch class set, his own means of producing the sounds, even his own puzzle. Then this piece became very easy and versatile to write and innovate.

Each player now would have his own piece to play that will be totally unique, played in conjunction with any number of players together simultaneously! This concept allows so much chance and differentiation, not to mention the allowance it would make for future performances and availability of materials.

So, the question then became, how to interpret the numbers. I could leave an unfinished puzzle as is, of course, but to me it made more sense to allow the performer(s) to use the puzzle as a means by which to determine the sounds made. I then made the connection that each performer could play his part as he solved for any given number. This way I was controlling nothing except the fact that each performer would have a set number of sounds to make, and would have to make his sounds in a regular manner consistently throughout the work. The duration of the piece should be as simple as the length of time it takes all players to complete a sudoku puzzle.  I did not think it would work for me to try and draw pictures as I thought they might be interpreted by any given performer, but rather I thought it made more sense to leave that up to each player.

I think the real beauty of this lies in the chance that each performance will be something totally unique and different. That anybody can play it and make it work. The constraints of our upcoming performance of these works led me to reorder the piece so that each player would use the empty boxes as silence, rather than completing the puzzle as part of the piece.