| NEWSPAPER- READING HACH INE Psi sie ‘ i eakenade eI OFZ Jalérial: (prole-) copte-s fe column about « | page on _&- ROWS, article. | _ Proteduve: eu aaveed SU nad be start, ead. es _—— eee tae a erteauconc ly Pallaring the. slaceck | insbuctices GX own speed, 8 | — _ epeerclination wile Ther players)- —— [ope silently Z | ays omimblek _setlo vote — 3 jx: sileatly except pox Va. word Che’, sung ee + | head ip He. voce « ol (pic Ext mm oleh “s6lt vou, the send "areal gpoles F sein, Caw tes Chin vet ; BSc Silewn, except ilbrpre ting Bama] et Wa | eet, Parry hea soumd ler : eee a DL tte vece., except wlerprelo - woth he qucet, poraly spoken Serainel fe. | 8%: silertly, excel — Ge, : 5) Cee, “the” Suma gfe ok Tl word “ond” spoken low See (At the embl a he Yeading Peucwcasien tact390 WORD EVENTS Statement on Verbal Notation John White, July 2010 In 1969 | stopped improvising, because most of the improvising situations i= which I found myself consisted of a lot of people playing very loudly for = long time to the edification of no-one in particular. | didn’t want to returs to tonality-orientated narrative composition at the time, but was interested ina kind of lightly controlled randomness in the way that sounds happened in time. ‘Lightly controlled randomness’ became, in those days, a desirable condition of music in which the sounds were given a chance to ‘speak for themselves’ in a relaxed way, rather than in over-tightly bundled compose tional packages or uncontrolled improvisational eruptions. Procedures like traditional church-bell ringing, rows of prime numbers the musical encoding of winning lottery numbers, numerical anagrams of various sorts, in short: systemic procedures scemed a reasonable escape from what had become the very predictable outcome of ‘free’ musie, Hence ‘Machines’, in which the performers followed clearly defined rules of behavior bur didn’t lead to a fixed end-result, became for me the genre of the moment. Newspaper-Reading Machine was the result of a conversation with Michael Parsons during a train journey in which we discussed the ease with which a ‘Machine’ could be created: in this case a few easy-to-follow instruc tions regarding the reading and re-readings of an article from a newspape= ‘Easy-to-follow’ instructions were a direct statement of opposition to exaggerated complexities of the 1960s ‘inner-circle-Darmstadt’ school of musical thoughr. Verbal scores are still economic ways of creating desired effects in cer compositional situations. In my own music, simple traditional notation usually OK for what I need these days.JOHN WHITE 391 Commentary: Newspaper-Reading Machine John Lely Newspaper-Reading Machine (c. 1971) is an example of a score that instructs performers to make use of a found text, in this case a newspaper article, as a secondary score for performance. There are nwo types of notation at work here: first, a verbal score in the forn of instructions describing a general procedure; second, a symbdlic form of notation reminiscent of traditional stave notation, in which symbols are associated with particular actions. ‘The composer uses the first type of notation (verbal) to describe the second (symbolic). The found newspaper article is divorced from its origi meaning, and instead used like an analogue sequencer. White associates nal commonly occutting textual elements — the words ‘the’ and ‘and’, as well as punctuation marks — with parsicular vocal sounds. The performers must independently work through the found newspaper article making the appropriate sounds whenever they see the corresponding element in the text. As with some of White’s other ‘machines"! from this time, in Newspaper- Reading Machine there is an interest in a spacious, relaxed yet controlled sound world, and its compositional ethos can perhaps be best appreciated through consideration of the context in which the work was originally composed and performed. In 1969 John White was named ‘musical adviser’ to the New Arts Lab, Robert Street in London. His brief was to organise a musical performance every Sunday afternoon for a year, White invited fellow composers and musicians to collaborate on various performances of extended duration. Usually any available rehearsal time was grcatly out-weighed by the projected duration of the performance. This format was therefore conducive to the very compact ‘machine’ scores that White composed around this time, which could be explained to performers relatively quickly, and unpacked in full during a performance. In a 1971 interview with Michacl Nyman, White explained: The sound and activities of the performer are fed like raw materials into a machine or process and emerge as a pattern unique to the occasion on which the particular machine is being performed. The sounds tend towards a rugged consonance, the procedures usually involve much repetition, with changes happening almost imperceptibly over large spans of time, and the atmosphere is usually pretty calm and unruffled however fast the pace of the music." As well as providing economical ways to generate performances of extended duration, the compositional procedures of works such as \ Other machines that White composed cround this time Machine (1970) ‘Machine (c. 1970) > Whit, Ja in Nyman, 1971, p.27. nelude Drinking and Hooting (G-Major Machine (1970), Gothic Chord Machine (1970), and Jew's Harp392 WORD EVENTS 1 to have been designed to encou with free improvisati As Newspaper-Reading Machine appea in light of the composer's previous experien a relatively formal and disciplined approach to performance. comments: the complacent attitude of the purveyors .d attitudes of indiscipline and lack of and felt that there had to be a new apps mers needed to make. By 1970 | felt impatient with “free music’ with their implie. to the effect on its audience, to the kind of statement that composer/perfor “To be kept: a certain element of randomness, ‘letting the sounds for themselves’, a relaxing of the strictures of the (by then) tradi John White, in correspondence with the author, July 2010. © John White, in interview with the autho, 10 July 2010. © Christopher Hobbs, in correspondence with the author, July 2010. © Dave Smith, in correspondence with the author, July 2010.394 WORD EVENTS. for the first time. I wouldn’t say that a ‘good’ performance is n guaranteed by sorting those matters, but you'd certainly be well way. There are ambiguities surrounding White’s machines. Some of them never written out in score form, and accurate dates of composition are! to ascertain from the composer. The only previously available put score of Newspaper-Reading Machine was a shortened version to be in Brian Dennis’ Projects in Sound, a book designed for use in class The Projects in Sound version of the score was, according to probably written out by Dennis through his own recollections of performances. Importantly, the Dennis version does not specify that players shoul through the same material, but that ‘each player selects a newspaper containing eight fairly substantial paragraphs (all the material should different as possible)’, thus altering the process considerably. The version also ends with performers reading the whole text silently and repeating the last five words ‘starting low and quiet and then getting and more frenzied until out of breath’. According to White, these instructions were ‘precty subjective, OK by me, but not an integral the original concepr’."’ The score for Newspaper-Reading Machine that is printed here is = version made by John White in 2010, the instructions having in the pas explained to performers orally or with reference to the Dennis is common with some of his other machines, the composer recognises ‘over the years there have probably been various versions “doing the cach being adapted slightly to fit with circumstances ~ a flexibility thar quite in keeping with the way the work was originally conceived, * bid. © Dennis, 1975, » John White, in correspondence with the author, July 2010.