The Notation and Performance of New Music

Author(s): Earle Brown

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 2 (1986), pp. 180-201
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/948118
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 The Notationand Performanceof New Music

EARLE BROWN

EVEN had there not been a special seminar on notation and performance
at Darmstadt this year [1964], it would be obvious that a great deal of
new music has come to be intimately dependent upon the practical ap-
plications of research in these aspects of music. Actually, in some music
and in extreme cases, these two elements have attained an equal footing
with compositional processes themselves, seemingly creating an entirely
new condition for music but in reality only new and unfamiliar to those
whose orientation is primarily that of Western "art" music. What is being
challenged by recent developments is not music itself but the concept
of what is "art" in music today and this is rightly a constantly recurring
problem which indicates that the art is still vital and alive.
Notation and performance, heretofore "given" and inherited practices,
have become significant and necessary areas of re-viewing precisely because
of the radical transformations which have taken place within the areas
of compositional techniques and aesthetics. Each has developed independ-
ently, to a degree, on the basis of two seemingly contradictory directions
that new music has taken: serialism and so-called aleatoric' music. I say
"seemingly contradictory" because, in spite of the essential difference
in operation, their "poetics" are similar, and these two directions have
recently come into an extraordinary alignment with each other. Serialism,
however, has been modified more by aleatoric tendencies than the contrary
and it is significant that, in fact, notation and performance innovations
began in the area of aleatoric tendencies.
The recent involvement with "new" notations and performanceprocesses
followed these rather severe challenges to existing compositional attitudes
but once the new problems were confronted notation and performance
became integral factors and new dimensions within the totality of the
new concepts. I will discuss this integral development of notation in terms
of aesthetic and technical necessity. Although there have been numerous
This is an edited version of lectures given by Earle Brown in Darmstadt in 1964.
1 Although this term is disastrously misleading in most of the cases to which it is applied, I will
momentarily exploit its recognition value (see Appendix).
180
 New Music 181

scores written which have utilized nontraditional notations, there are rela-
tively few in which the notation has played a really functional role in the
essential nature of the musical conception of the work. By "really functional
role," I mean that the piece could not be notated traditionally and that
the sound of the work is of an essentially different character because of
the new notation. The "decorative" value of a score is in itself a pleasure
but I am more concerned with the possibilities of a notational system
that will produce an aural world which defies traditional notation and
analysis and creates a perfomance "reality" which has not existed before.2
Because of the multiplicity of specific viewpoints among composers
today and the extremely personal nature of notation (which is the only
visible evidence of the composer's initial and developed conception), it
is most important to keep an open frame of reference in regardto ultimate
usefulness for the one using it. Happily, this field has not yet been codified
and academicized, and through this "open frame" can enter all manner
of surprises and unexpected communications which it is the nature of
art to present to us.

A word about what I have referred to as a similarity of poetics existing

between serial and aleatoric concepts. Within the strictness of technical
procedures in serial music of approximately ten years ago and the extremes
of structural and formal control such as Schillinger theories and related
mathematical proposals, there is an underlying acceptance of a kind of
autonomy and a by-passing of subjective control and determination of
the subjective "rightness" of each succeeding or simultaneous detail. In
place of this historical prerequisite of total control and aesthetic subjectivity,
there was substituted a "rightness" of a generative system in the sense
of a macro-system of distributive processes from which most of the details
and relationships followed rather autonomously and were "right" because
of their rational derivation from the larger system of relationships. This,
as a general condition in serial and like attitudes, presupposes a poetic
acceptance of micro-manifestations not totally within the control of the
composer but actually once removed and, subjectively speaking, is an in-
determinate function of a closed rational system. Here we have a basic
condition of accepting unforeseeable configurations of, paradoxically,
totally rational and controlled systems.
On the other hand, in the area of aleatoric approaches, we have a similar
acceptance of unforeseeable developments. Later I will discuss the very
many different varieties of approach and operation within the general
2
I should add that I am speaking of new notations whose primary application is toward ex-
tending the musical sound possibilities rather than those moving toward verbal or graphic descriptions
of more "theatrical" activities.
182 The Musical Quarterly

area of aleatoric music, very little of which is "chance" music, but for
now it may suffice to say that the underlying existence of autonomous
(not in detail subjective) systems and the acceptance of a generalized
"rightness," and the aleatoric tendency to allow non-subjectively arrived
at conditions to occur as generalized "rightness" produces an admittedly
obscure and tenuous but nevertheless significant "poetic" element as a
connective. Despite this connective, however, the two mentalities from
which these two manifestations of today's music arose were poles apart
in regard to influences and philosophical outlook. From this comes
the "drama" and exciting history of recent new music developments. The
"growing together" of serial composition and aleatoric composition was
latent in the two approaches. It has nothing to do with the musical value
of the products but as things have developed serial techniques has expanded
and been modified in the direction of aleatory rather than the reverse.
This development was latent in what I would call an unrealistic aspect
of serial principles of composition relative to performance itself. Modifi-
cations of aleatory were latent in the extreme nature of a certain American
iconoclastic tradition. Malcomb Cowley said that Americans frequently
correct their own and other peoples' mistakes by going to the opposite ex-
treme... but this is usually only in order to obtain an inclusive perspective.

I hope not to belabor the point, but something should be said about
notation and performance prior to the "standardization"of nineteenth-cen-
tury music. Although a major part of my musical education was in the study
and compositional application of polyphony and counterpoint (from ninth-
century organum through twentieth-century twelve-tone counterpoint), I am
not an authority on early Western music, and despite this exposure my
own involvement in new possibililities arose from totally different in-
fluences. Nevertheless, there is a curious feeling of returning to a musical
condition which prevailed in times past that is apparent in aspects of
rhythmic flexibility and the increase of perfomer involvement on a creative
level; more accurately and to the point, on the level of creative collaboration.
The early development of musical notation proceeded, of course, in
the direction of more and more discrete control of all the elements and
did not achieve its "standard" appearance until after 1600 and its stan-
dardization of performance practice (the function of the conductor as we
know it) until approximately 1800. Obviously we do not negate the music
prior to these modern acquisitions merely because they do not conform
to present practice. They have their own unique and very beautiful nature
and expressive quality. Varese has said that just because there are other ways
of getting there, you do not kill the horse. And for those who tend to
feel endangered by recent developments, this attitude can be applied as
 New Music 183

well to my attitude in regard to the use of "standard" notation today.

Prior to 1600 there were many different approaches to notating the
composer's intentions and even the composer's intentions were very dif-
ferent from what we think of as the nineteenth-century ideal. These early
notational systems and compositional intentions are still very much a matter
of musicological conjecture in the area of precision and flexibility in per-
formance and will remain so, perhaps even intensified by recent examples
of composers' inclinations toward ambiguity and flexibility of interpretation
in today's music.
It has been convenient to "modernize" early notations to express them
in our standard "rational" terms for purposes of analysis and performance,
but I happen to be one of those who consider this an over-simplification
and a misrepresentation of the sound and expressive character of musical
performance as it existed between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. In
that performance always defies anlysis, the convenient thing was to reduce
the evidence to our new-found graphic rationale of anlysis-by-counting,
both horizontally and vertically. This is not to say that the results in per-
formance from the original notations were so radically different from what
can be indicated by our standard notation; only that the imposition of
standard "fixatives," such as metric durations, bar lines, and precise pitch
tends to ignore the aural tradition and nature of performing practice, which,
from much other evidence, would seem to have existed before 1600, and
tends to attach a rigidity of image which is an aural conditioning and per-
formance standard acquired only since about 1800.
What I mean to imply is that the notation and performance concerns
of some of today's composers are not necessarily in the nature of a for-
tuitous revolt as much as they are a continuation of attempts, on the one
hand, to find a more accurate way of transcribing the nature of their aural
image in graphics, and on the other, to develop and intensify the necessary
(and complementary) relationship which must exist between the composer,
the score, the performer, and the audience, in directions which are also
conducive to the composer experiencing his image as sound. Today's music
seems to be approaching the art in a way which is closer to the old concep-
tion of "music making" than it is to the deterministic, "heroic" ideal of
music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the same way that the
technical basis of music in the line of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and on
into the early 1950s, is closer to polyphonic and contrapuntal techniques of
Machaut than it is to the Classical harmonic period. (I refer here to the
similarity of some serial procedures to the structural concept of isorhythm.)

Although I am not making a plea for a return to the musical Middle

Ages (in other than an appreciative sense), I am generalizing on the basis
184 The MusicalQuarterly

of observing a continuation of the human, artistic, and technical concerns

of organizing (or provoking) a sounding entity in time, which I think are
the root elements or "ground" upon which a piece of music is made; the
unchanging principal elements in the process of "music as we know it,"
which is not to eliminate the possibility of and the importance of "music
as we do not know it" or that music which exists in other cultures
or in other areas of our own culture. The process, "as we know it" is com-
poser-graphic representation-performer-auditor. Traditional, inherited
techniques, such as harmony and counterpoint, are historical facts
but of only transitory importance within the total reality of the art of
music.
As Busoni wrote, "The spirit of an art-work, the measure of emotion,
of humanity, that is in it-these remain unchanged in value through changing
years; the form which these three assumed, the manner of their expression,
and the flavor of the epoch which gave them birth, are transient, and age
rapidly."3
The connection between and the meaning inherent in present concerns
with notation and performance, and the pre-1600 conditions lies in this
area of non-changing human involvement. Beyond this "universal" basic
similarity the operating principles and compositional necessities are totally
different, and each is unique and specifically relevant to its own time.
If it is also true to its own time, it will ultimately be seen to have been
inevitable and to have fulfilled its cultural responsibilities.
The phrase "cultural responsibility" is of course loaded with ambiguity
and "open" to many interpretations. Each of the two words, in fact, must
be explored individually and then in relationship to each other.
Our particular Western art music is merely one manifestation of the
general human tendency to express "something" through the medium
of sound. It may seem obvious but it is too often forgotten that we are
living in a time in which we must take the history of the entire world as
our history and its expressive and communicative languages and vocabularies
as meaningful, most explicitly in the art of sounds, which by nature do
not have to be translated in order to be as "clear as a bell." If we cannot
respond to these languages of sound, it is because we are indolent in our
minds and narrow in our response and outlook; we have accepted definitions
and passing fancies in exchange for experience and the potentially unlimited
human capacity for correlation and "meaning." Meaning does not come
directly from external stimuli; it is the intuitive correlation between external
stimuli and the total latent resources of an individual's consciousness,
and it is the responsibility of the individual to raise this consciousness to

3 "Sketch of a New Aesthetic," in Three Classics (New York, 0000), p. 75.

 New Music 185

the highest power that the coefficients of human awareness can provide.
The road from artist to audience is not an "Einbahnstrasse" of meaning,
communication, and responsibility. This is what I mean by "cultural re-
sponsibility," and it moves outward in all directions from every human
endeavor.
Because of the time in which we live, and the tremendous amounts
of sheer information we can be exposed to and the speed with which it
is transmitted from country to country and people to people, the responsi-
bility is greater than at any time in the past. The quality of the responsibility
is not greater but the amount of information to which one must be re-
sponsible is infinitely greater. It is not by chance that some composers
consider a continuum to be the "canvas" for their activity and indeter-
minacy a vehicle for its expression; both of these terms have been in the
vocabulary of science since Heisenberg.4 They have also been functions
in all of the arts for a very long time but only recently have they come
to the surface as functions to be dealt with consciously; another (perhaps
paradoxical) indication of everything seeking further "clarification" and
the continuation of the human tendency to go deeper and deeper into
the nature of nature, both human and physical.
Gertrude Stein once said that "nothing changes from one generation
to another except the things seen and the things seen make the generation."5
With this inevitable change in what is being seen by each succeeding genera-
tion, there as inevitably follows a tremendous thrashing about in the pro-
fession of art criticism and all of the values seem to have been undone.
Although artists and critics are for the most part of different generations,
I do not see why there should be such a gap in "what is being seen." The
same "world" is available to both but I suppose that it is the difference
between the essential natures of the two involvements. I hesitate to think
that it is the "authoritarian" position of the critics which leads them to
excesses of absolutism but at times I wish that they would hesitate to
think that artists are nihilistic by nature. The air is constantly filled with
messages and communications, but if you do not have a radio or a telephone
or other means responsive to the conditions of transmission, you are not
going to get the message, and as far as you are concerned, there will not
seem to be one. Until the communicatee is on the same wave length as
the communicator he cannot very well complain about the lack of com-
munication.
Some of the "things seen" and heard by today's composers are the sound
and performance characteristics and notation of non-Western music; the
history, characteristics, and aims of jazz; the aesthetics and "notational"
4 Heisenberg "Indeterminacy Principle" (1927).
5 Gertrude Stein, Whatare Masterpieces? (New York, 1970), p. 26.
186 The Musical Quarterly

developments in literature and poetry; the radical transformations within

theater, films, and the plastic arts; and the philosophy of science and phi-
losophy itself.
All of these things, since they are important to my own work and the
work of many other composers, are still controversial, but the existence
of such a "climate of consciousness" would certainly seem of some im-
portance. Anyone who can find nothing relevant or of value in any of these
areas, not to mention their connective relevance, has simply given up what-
ever it is that makes communication and meaning possible.
It is well known that notation has been a constant difficulty and frustra-
tion to composers, since it is a relatively inefficient and incomplete transcrip-
tion of the infinite totality which a composer traditionally "hears," and it
should not be at all surprisingthat it continues to evolve. It serves as vocabu-
lary and punctuation in an abstract language whose syntax is potentially in-
finite. The difficulty of indicating all of the articulate and inarticulate inflec-
tions in "speaking" this language is immense. I was once very envious of
painters who can deal directly with the existent reality of their own work
without this indirect and imprecise "translation" stage. I would ask them if
they could imagine sitting down and writing out a set of directions so that
someone else would be able to paint exactly what they themselves would
paint in all details. I thought about this problem from this angle of direct
contact with oneself and sounds, and it had an effect upon my notation and
performance concerns-the latter most obvious in Folio (1952-53) and, as
developed, in Available Forms (1961) in which the conductor is in effect
"painting" (forming) with a palette of my composed sound events.
Charles Ives was probably one of the first composers whose musical
imagination and conception seriously fought against the inadequacies of
the standard notation. He was vocal in his objections, and his music displays
all manner of attempts to disengage infinite sound from finite graphics.
Henry Cowell said of Ives's music and some of these problems: "Usually
one feels that Ives hopes to induce the performer not to be too bound
by any one way of organizing strong and weak beats, playing the passages
now one way, now another. Ives' whole approach to his complex rhythms
should be understood as an attempt to persuade players away from the
strait-jacket of regular beats, with which complete exactness is impossible
anyhow.... In fact, Ives has often expressed regret at having to write
out a piece at all, since its rhythm will then be hopelessly crystallized."6
The development of notation to represent quarter tones was successful
mainly because it only takes a minor modification of existing "accidentals"
to indicate the additional pitches, but neither quarter tones nor other
6
Henry and Sydney Cowell, CharlesIves and His Music (New York, 0000), pp.
 New Music 187

more radical subdivisions of the octave (such as the forty-three pitches

of Harry Partch) seem to have become compositionally necessary as "ra-
tional" systems. Why this rational further subdivision of pitch has not been
more prevalent seems to me due to two factors. The first is that magnetic
tape and electronic music resources have plunged us directly into an available
continuum of pitch in which the microtonal intervals are expressed by
numbers corresponding to frequency, this, in itself, being a "new" musical
notation but not the one previously under discussion. The other factor
is an inadvertant by-product of developments in other directions. I think
that when the triadic harmonic system ceased to be a determining factor
in the structure and syntax of a work, and horizontal movement, polyphony,
single tones, and a true atonality or pantonality became more prevalent,
there was an inevitable loosening-up of precise pitch articulation (except
in the piano and other keyboard instruments, of course, although today
we have a multiplicity of new piano techniques, which I am sure were
at least subconscious solutions of the inflexibility of keyboard instruments)
and micro-divisions of the octave became automatically-almost secretly-a
part of the new vocabulary of instrumental music. Apart from some of
the more radical new notations which consciously engage pitch as a con-
tinuum, I see no reason why this is the only sound element not to have
been developed in the direction of more finite control; unless the "hands-
off" policy had something to do with the magic and hypnotic number
twelve.
With regard to the use of piano as an instrument of imprecise (micro-
tonal) pitch, I would like to propose, as a partial substantiation of this
theory, the nearly simultaneous development of instrumental piano tech-
niques which, among other things, delimit the instrument from its insistent
pitch accuracies. The development of tone clusters had more to do with
harmony than with pitch as such, although the sound of a tone cluster
enters this world of blurred and imprecise pitch. Playing directly on the
strings of the piano, as in the early works of Cowell, and the further "pre-
paring" of the timbre of the piano strings in the work of Cage, occurred
much earlier than the fully defined serial condition under discussion. They
were more related to developments in American percussion music (of which
there was quite a strong independent movement in the thirties and forties)
which was of course a significant part of the worldwide historical develop-
ment of the pitch dimension of sound in following the intervals of the
overtone scale, from octaves to microtones, as "harmonic" materials. So
it seems to me that atonality and serialism rather inadvertently became
involved with microtones in instruments other than piano, and in a sense
the piano was forced at times to give up its exclusive accuracy or become
an outcast. This is a rather complex situation since there is a very large
188 The Musical Quarterly

amount of piano music from serial composers. It is curious, however, that

it is mostly in solo piano music that the conflict does not arise, for instance
between a relative pitch violin and an absolute pitch piano. I have never
written a piece specifically for solo piano in which I used the "inside-the-
piano" sounds (distinct from pieces which can be performed on any in-
strument, as in Folio); it always seemed that the changing from keys to
strings imposed too much of a limit on horizontal speed and complexity.
On the other hand, however, I have never used the piano with other in-
struments without including "on-the-strings"sonorities; it has always seemed
necessary to me, to provoke the piano into a microtonal association with the
other instruments. Music for Cello and Piano (1954-55) is the most obvious
example in which I intentionally set up a timbral confusion through which I
hoped to make the two instruments sound like one large instrument of
complex timbre (an orchestra, in effect). I have played a tape of this piece to
people who were unfamiliar with it and was pleased to find that its in-
strumentation was estimated to be violin, cello, piano, and percussion. This
tendency to expand instrumental techniques toward microtonality has
become general.
The Schoenberg "Sprechstimme" is a notational innovation and a
fitting approach to the un-notatable continuum of sound possibilities.
Again, it is the loosening of the existing notation to achieve more accu-
racy. The ambiguity is more than outweighed by the graphic clarity of
intention.
Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and Leo Ornstein devised notation for
"tone clusters" when the standard notation (primarily developed for triadic
vertical structures) made the clusters visually contrary to the desired simul-
taneity. William Russell wrote much percussion music in the 1930s and
1940s and devised a notation for playing on the strings of a piano with
a dining fork, and for all of the eighty-eight notes of the piano to be struck
simultaneously; Henry Cowell devised notations for playing directly on
the strings of the paino, as in Banshee.
These are, however, primarily adaptations of the standard notation
to new sounds and instrumental resources, which while not insignificant,
do not basically affect the nature of the musical discourse or performance.
There was an attempt by Cowell to revise the notational situation
in terms of rhythm (published as a theory in New Musical Resources in
1930, but first used in his music in about 1917). Nicolas Slonimsky said:
Before he was twenty . . . [Cowell] delved for the first time into the problems of no-
tation. This latter, not having been taught him as an establishedreligion,he examined
without fear-and dissented from its inadequacies. The duple system of rhythmical
designations,giving adequate representationof only halves, quarters,eighths, etc., was
the particularbeam in the eye which Henry Cowell endeavoredto extricate.He proposed
 New Music 189

a special notation for other fractions, so as to avoid the annoying and unscientific me-
thods of setting down triplets, quintuplets,etc.7
This was the assigning of different shapes to the noteheads, each indicating
a different subdivision of the beat. Although no one seems to have adopted
this notation, it was a very reasonable suggestion, as were many in Cowell's
astonishing book, New Musical Resources.
The extreme and startling requests of Ives, for precision and detail
of inflection in all sound elements, did not result in his using a new notation
as such. Out of frustration, he wrote a great many verbal instructions in
his attempt to destandardize the performer's approach to notes and cause
them to collaborate creatively in achieving the elusive sound and feeling
he wanted. His "impracticality" and refusal to be limited (at least con-
ceptually) by traditional conformism are marvelously apparent in his in-
cluding parts for flute and viola in his Second Sonata for piano.
Schillinger advocated total control of every aspect of all musical situa-
tions but proposed nothing radical in the way of notations. Schillinger's
desire for precision led him to recommend precise metric control (notational
control) of rubato, accelerando, and ritardando (not to be entrusted to
a performer) and the numerical plotting of everything. He did, however,
set up a chart of instrumental abbreviations and graphic representations
for use in scores, which is very reasonable, clear, and useful, under some
conditions of extreme complexity. Schillinger was convinced that music
was moving toward a completely mathematically plotted, machine-generated
and -produced period, a conviction with which I could not agree. He worked
on electronic instruments and possibilities with Leon Theremin and his
own theories included the mechanical and mathematical control of all the
art media, as well as non-art media such as the sense of smell, and was
well on his way to the use of computers, cybernetics, programming, and
so forth, at the time of his death in 1943.
Schillinger's famous graphs were just that: a method of numerically
analyzing and synthesizing sound materials through both the horizontal
and vertical axes and an aid to correlating them and seeing their numerical
proportions graphically. They were a kind of geometrical shorthand and
not meant to be used in performance. His theory of musical composition
is, to paraphrase Schoenberg, a "structural functions of sound" approach,
accepting none of the inherited techniques as essential today.
Indian and other Oriental musics have survived very well and achieved
incredible degrees of subtlety and expressive nuance of rhythm, pitch,
timbre, and intensity. It is basically an "ear" music, however, and precision
on paper (and the veneration of that paper) has never seemed important
7
"HenryCowell," in American Composerson AmericanMusic, ed. HenryCowell (New York,
1933), p. 59.
190 The MusicalQuarterly

to them. Music is more a way of life than a way of making the final state-
ment, and their lack of accurately notating their very complex music has
in no way inhibited their musical life. The spirit and sound of a Javanese
gamelan orchestra is a very moving experience, by any standard.
Jazz is similarly an "ear"-oriented music, actively unnotatable and
not particularly concerned about it, micro-flexible in all dimensions, and
specifically definable only in the hearing of it. The rapport between jazz
performers and Indian musicians is a joy to behold and a revelation to hear.
They immediately connect with one another and make music together
as if they had always been associated, and with obvious pleasure on a pro-
found level of communication. (It is the more "progressive"jazz musicians
who make this connection.) Some American "avant-garde"jazz musicians
have done away with the traditional harmonic basis and the rhythmic
rationale. They know what is going on in "our" music and most of them
have been very much influenced by its "abstract" sound world. They,
of course, never having been attached to notation, produce their version
of it by simply spontaneously playing it, in aural imitation of its general
style and character. Notated jazz, such as that for an orchestra, is perfectly
standard, but the reading and instrumental expression of the notes is very
far from what the notes would lead one to expect. They are constantly
between, under, over, and around the notation, but collectively so, pro-
ducing, at its best, the sound of a single, intuitively unified conception;
"as one man" as all music should. Here is the best example of a tradition
which is not "literally" attached to its notation, which is both its greatest
virtue and its most serious limitation. But it is overcoming that limitation,
peculiar to aural traditions, as we are, relative to the limitations of our
"literal" tradition.

Today from the standpoint of a technical, rather than an aesthetic,

forcing of a notational evolution, it seems to me directly relative to the
developments of traditional notation in serial composition in the direction
of further precision and sophistication to a point at which, as Herman
Scherchen has said, a "law of diminishing returns" takes effect. The kind
of new notation that I am discussing generally tends toward a lessening
of precise control and the conscious introduction of ambiguity. I think
that this is a decrease of control but tending toward an increase of sophis-
tication, and even the decrease of finite control can be seen as an expansion
of resources and the inclusion of unnotatable detail. Given the fact that
we will continue to have the standard notation and standardization of
practice at hand, when needed, this later development is certainly an addi-
tion, rather than a subtraction, of musical possibilities and in no sense
a negative development.
 New Music 191

The passing of time modifies everything. I do not presume to speak

for the experiences and conclusions of other composers in regardto standard
notation and its continued ability to function for them and for performance
as they see (hear) it, but in my own work, in 1950-52, I came to a point
of indicating rhythmic complexity and durational subtleties which seemed
to me to be beyond counting and beyond performers' conscious or un-
conscious control of metric divisions on which standard notation is based.
This was in essence confirmed by a conversation with David Tudor concern-
ing my Perspectives for piano (1952), which is dedicated to him. It is in
standard notation and is the last piece in which I used a tone row. It is based
on serial principles which derived from Schillinger techniques of "total
organization" rather than from the Webern-derivedserial principles. Some
of the similarities are the use of what Schillinger called "rhythmic groups"
corresponding to serial "cellules," permutation of units, the "coordination
of time structures," which is basically an isorhythmic principle of structure,
and the numerical integration of all sound components. The main difference
seems to be Schillinger's lack of emphasis on a contrapuntal approach.
Because Perspectives was based on these "generative" principles and did
not have a continuity in direct performance relationship to a regular pulse
or "beat," it fell into phrases and groups of durations and rests which
were extremely difficult to read in the sense of counting (this is how it
transcribed directly from the compositional technique). Before I made
a final copy, I asked Tudor if he would prefer that I renotate it so that
the durations would be countable in terms of a uniform pulse. He said,
no, that it did not really matter because he practiced it in terms of duration
relative to tempo and simply added and multiplied temporal units in their
phraseology until he arrived at the definition of the individual groups,
and so on, up through the entire structure of the work. At least this is how
I understood his way of performing such "beat-less" pieces.
While working on Perspectives, I began sketching some pieces for
orchestra in standard notation. It soon became apparent that what I wanted
to hear and the compositional technique necessary to achieve it were pro-
ducing fragments and fractions of beats that, if playable at all with the nota-
tionally explicit accuracy, would take an unheard-of number of rehearsals.
A sociological fact might be relevant to my not continuing with the
sketches, while at approximately the same time European composers were
proceeding with comparable complexity in traditional notations. It is the
simple fact that there was not then, nor is there now, any possibility in
America of having nearly enough rehearsals for such detail demanding
such accuracy of performance by a large orchestra. This continues to be
one of the reasons that many excellent European scores for large groups
have yet to be performed in America.
192 The Musical Quarterly

I obviously do not recommend changing one's compositional outlook

on writing down to the lowest common denominator of performance pos-
sibilities, but this was before Le Marteau sans Maitre and Gruppen, and
before knowing that there were orchestras somewhere that would rehearse
such pieces. It made me stop and think very seriously about the function
and practicality of standard notation. It seems to me much more reasonable
to notate directly in time relationships rather than in a metric notation
which would then be transferred back into time relatonships in the per-
formance process. The solution was to refer the notation directly to the
performance process itself, in terms of the nature of time itself. The desire
to control every aspect of the performance to the most minute degree,
having brought us a position of approximation, and (for myself) needing
to use these minute "particles" of durations, dynamics, timbre, and rhythms,
it seemed natural to notate temporal and sonic particles within a framework
that the performer could "realize" without the conflict of an "unperform-
able" and therefore distracting set of measurements.
If I misunderstood Tudor I apologize to him, but I do not apologize
to myself because whatever it was, it was a revelation and an opening into
the technical possibilities which were necessary to deal musically with
another entire area of art involvement which was of much concern to me
at that time.
This notational "problem" in 1952 not only led to my finding a notation
which was much more suitable for my musical language in a technical
sense, but also to discovering the "graphic" potential for dealing with
the problems of "mobility" and immediacy which had been of great interest
to me since the influence of Calder and Pollock in approximately 1948.
For me, the mobility (or mutability) of the work had to be activated during
the performance of the work (as in a mobile of Calder), and expressed
spontaneously and intensely by the performer, as in the immediacy of
contact between Pollock and his canvas and materials. These two elements
-mobility of the sound elements within the work, and the graphic pro-
vocation of an intense collaboration throughout the composer-notation-
performance process-were for me the most fascinating new possibilities
for "sound objects" as they had been for sculpture and painting. The ne-
cessity for new means of graphic representation is obvious.
The compositions, Folio (1952-53) and Twenty-Five Pages (1953),
were my first attempts to cross-relate these two influences and to realize
the essence of these involvements in sound. The most fascinating aspect
was the ambiguous relationship existing between the artist and the work,
and the delicate balances one had to deal with between subjective-objective
contact with the work; between freedom and control; explicit-implicit
notations; and between compositional necessity and performance reality
 New Music 193

as an intimate collaborative process. I wanted (and still want) very much

for the work to have a "reality" of its own in addition to the specific con-
trols imposed by myself and by the performer. Ambiguity in the service
of expanding the conceptual and real potential of the work must not lead
to the loss of the work as a recognizable, and to a certain extent, "objective"
entity. The "object" must reappear transformed by the process imposed
upon it as a "subject."
After Perspectives, I began to work on the Folio pieces, which are
single-page pieces in different notational systems and which request varying
degrees of performer involvement in their final form and, in two cases
(November 1952 and December 1952), the sound content. Folio led to
a notation which I still use in pieces such as Music for Cello and Piano
and the Available Forms works, which I called "time notation" and aspects
of what has come to be called "open form," as in the Available works,
but now modified and specific in content. Folio was composed between
October, 1952 and June, 1953 (the titles of the pieces are the dates of
composing) and, as far as I know, they are the first examples of "mobile"
or "open-form" works.
After this very personal history of dissatisfaction and questionings
which led up to my own first work with "new" notation and performance
possibilities, I must say that, even if my reasons and conclusions in regard
to a "crisis" seem justified on technical grounds, it is actually an aesthetic
point of view not generally accepted by European composers at that time
which allowed me to accept the ramifications of my particular "solution."
My particular view that rhythmic fragmentation in standard notation
of serial works had reached a point of "diminishing returns" is not neces-
sarily so, generally, but it seemed that the possible notational accuracy
on paper bypassed its maximum point of producing finite control in per-
formance and proceeded into a realm of human response where it again
became only an approximation and suggestive of actions. All notation
is basically "only suggestive" but once it arrives at the extreme point of
fragmentation and fractioning that it has, it becomes a "statistical" accuracy
and the question arises, Is there not a more functional and less self-defeating
and more realistic graphic suggestion? There is not of course, if one insists
that any degree of fragmentation of duration is accurately performable,
and it may be, but if it is not, the development of precision in notation
has contradicted itself.
There are two Cowell stories relevant to this question. I once asked
him if he thought a piece of mine (in standard notation) was performable
with accuracy. He said he really did not know, but not to underestimate
the changes of performance possibilities which the passage of time brings;
no one could sing the Ives songs when he wrote them but now many people
194 The Musical Quarterly

sing them. (I did not ask how accurately.) To interpose a not so relevant
but very amusing Schoenberg story: A violinist once told me that his Violin
Concerto needed a violinist with six fingers, and Schoenberg said, "I'll
wait"; and today five-fingered violinists play it. (There is the hurdle of
aesthetic inertia, not to be discounted, of course.) The other Cowell story,
somewhat contradicting his first, and told on another occasion, is that
someone had been making electronic analyses of musical performances
and that, in a passage of uniform eighth notes, at a moderate tempo, no
two of them were given the same actual durational value and that none
of them conformed to the written value.
So, where is accuracy and finite control and what is a good performance?
It is precisely in the hands and mind, the physical and mental responses,
of a fine and devoted performer, who is in an indefinable and unnotatable
relationship to the clearest possible graphic representation of a potential
sound event. To be clear is to have foreseen and removed the barriers be-
tween cause and effect, as well as to be explicit. Cause and effect are not
rationally connected, and the shortest distance between two people is
not a straight line.
Given the fact that there is a need for new notational possibilities,
apart from my personal needs and particular aesthetics, the existence of
the problem in a general sense implies three things: either human performers
are obsolete, the standard notation is obsolete, or compositional intentions
themselves are on the wrong track.
However, contrary to some attitudes, electronic music did not come
into existence because composers considered human performers obsolete.
The limited attraction (and infinitely frustrating) possibility of finite rhy-
thmic control was not nearly as exciting as the possibilities of a new and
theoretically unlimited world of timbre, space, and density; not to mention
the, also theoretical, simplicity of performance, relative to orchestral per-
formance. (It eliminates a lot of arguments with performers, but the re-
sources are nearly as elusive.) The conflict between notation and human
performance, and the possibility of music on tape, occurred at about the
same time, but except in the attitudes of a few hypnotized composers
it did not generally convince composers that there was no alternative.
No decent piece of electronic music (or rhythmic articulation) defies human
performance.
As to compositional intentions being on the wrong track, this is, of
course, a profoundly disturbing and much-discussed possibility, but so
it has been throughout the history of all the arts, sciences, and philosophies
for those not actively engaged in the doing of it. Art, as a spectator sport,
creates all manner of disturbances and disruptions in the complacency of
those who expect it to always follow their book of rules and regualtions.
 New Music 195

Most people who cling to the book of rules and regulations, and create
the largest disturbance and confusion, are quoting the rules of a game
they remember with fondness, but does not happen to be the one that
is being played for them.
Why is it never learned that art is an exploration of experience and
communication and meaning? There is always a cry for individuality and
originality, but at the first indication of either the cry changes to nihilism,
no values, anti-art, sensationalism. This is the difference between human
nature and the human mind. The human mind recognizes the essential
nature of life as change, but human nature is insecure and protective.
It has been pointed out by many critics that serialism and aleatoric
techniques ultimately arrive at the same point; a relinquishing of control;
in the former case by unconsciously overestimating the coefficient of com-
municative intellectual processes, and in the latter case by a willful act
of not applying rational processes at all. Arriving at this same point, it
is said that they both negate human, subjective connectives which are
essential to a work of art being communicative and human. Needless to
say, this is said in the darkest tones and with all the trappings of severe
and presumptuous criticism.
It is quite true and curious that these two controversial approaches
to composition today have a common basis in the composer's conscious
disconnecting of, in some cases, details of the piece, and in other cases,
the formal configuration, from his subjective control. No one seems to
realize, however, that the details and/or the formal aspects do in fact come
into existence.
I will presume to speak for a great many other composers as well as
for myself and say that music today is certainly on the right track. There
is never only one right track, and the multiplicity may create a feeling of
confusion and lack of direction, but the direction is there nevertheless,
amongst the welter of distracting excesses and impertinence and poetry.

As mentioned above the technical reasons for developing "time nota-

tion" were connected with Perspectives and Folio in 1952. The aesthetic
conditions for taking this step, and they are far more significant for me
and have much more to do with performance and the nature of the musical
activity as a whole than they do with notation as such, were prepared
long before this.
As a student of music in Boston between 1946 and 1950, there was
very little of musical interest to keep one occupied more than academically.
I will not go into the bleakness of the self-consciously "American" music
of that time, but it had managed to make Varese and Webern cultural
outcasts (if not downright unconstitutional) and the possibility of knowing
196 The MusicalQuarterly

and being influenced by their work was virtually nil. While enjoyable and
valuable, the studies in polyphony and counterpoint, including twelve-
tone counterpoint, were very academic and sixteenth-century oriented.
The Schillinger studies were tremendously interesting and the only con-
nection with a really new and exciting creative line of thought.
At this same time, however, a real revolution was under way in painting
in New York, which, I believe, was the final "push" that made the arts
in general realize that they were somewhere they had never been before.
Like all revolutions in the arts, it was only violent and willful if you had
not followed the trajectory of its coming to be a necessity.
I cannot discuss all the relevant steps which led up to "abstract ex-
pressionist" painting, and obviously cannot trace it all in this context.
If that art is not a "fact" and acceptable art to you, I can only suggest
that we follow Ives's concept that if it is not always beautiful in accordance
with accepted standards, why cannot we accept a few other standards?
The first work of this kind that I saw and heard about was that of
Jackson Pollock in 1947 or 1948, and its impact was considerable and
lasting. The dynamic and "free" look of the work, and the artistic and
philosophical implications of Pollock's work and working processes, seemed
completely right and inevitable. In a sense it looked like what I wanted
to hear as sound and seemed to be related to the "objective" compositional
potential of Schoenberg's "twelve equal tones related only to one another"
and Schillinger's mathematical way of generating materials and structure,
even though the painting technique was extremely spontaneous and sub-
jective.
This play of paradox between objectivity and subjectivity I find to be
the most profound and challenging characteristic of art today and at the
heart of all creative work.
Despite the seeming and the actual "hazard" in the painting process
of Pollock, he and all of his intensity were on the other end of the brush
and it was a unique and transforming intensity. It took a tremendous act
of will to come to paint that way, and a complete devotion and commitment
to himself and all that art might conceivably be, a tremendous risk and
responsibility.
Particularly in Pollock, but also generally characteristic of all of the
artists of that group, was the deep commitment to the act of painting
and to the "objective" validity of the materials themselves, as two forces
keeping each other in balance. When asked if any of his paintings ever
turned out badly, Pollock said in an interview with Frank O'Hara, "It is
only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess."
This extreme personal involvement in the painting process itself is,
from one point of view, subjective, but through the immediacy and intensity
 New Music 197

of the creative confrontation with the materials and their formal potential,
the result achieves an objective existence outside of the artist's subjective
control, but obviously having come into existence through his act of will.
This subjectivity is the intense inwardness of reflexive assimilation, which
achieves a state of absolute stillness and unification. Long ago, Max Ernst
said that he wanted to be a spectator at the birth of his works, when re-
flecting upon the subjective-objective technique of "frottage." Ernst also
said that if such techniques continued to have a place in art, it would offend
a lot of people, but it would ultimately "hasten to bring about the crisis
of consciousness due in our time." I think he has been proven right.
We do have a "crisis of consciousness," and it has changed the nature
of the artist's relationship to his work and the relationship of the work
to a performer, reader, viewer, or listener. The "loosening" of notational
controls and the conscious introduction of ambiguity and spontaneity
in performance were, for me, a way to deal with this new situation, as I
felt it, in 1952.
The "objective" aspect in the creation of a work today enters from
philosophy and science, as well as from art. From philosophy and science
come the concepts of relativity and indeterminacy. They do not presume to
give us the final answer and imply that the functional, temporary answer is
given by the ever-changingconditions. The effect of this on art, which is bas-
ically a non-practical "spiritual" activity, is that the conditions (physical and
those temporarily assigned by the artist) have within them their own formal,
structural and communicative justifications. The responsibility of the artist is
then to bring a work into existence through a total commitment to the basic
nature of the materials and the conditions derived from their nature. From
this can come a work having an objective reality and universality of emotive
potential which is not limited by a self-limiting subjective condition (self-
limiting in that if based on a single emotive "idea" it presupposes the under-
standing of idea for its proper effect to the exclusion of all others). If
philosophy and science teach us anything, it is that all points of view are
possible. Given this condition, where is the basis of choice where the func-
tion of art is always an open question? Art is by nature a subjective ex-
perience for the audience, and to allow this nature to be maintained and to
be most free in relation to experience, it is essential that the experience
which it is given is a multi-ordinal, objective, and non-subjectively limited
and conditioned work. What has happened is something like the recognition
of the difference between a message and the general concept of communica-
tion: a message has specific, usually functional information to impart; com-
munication can take place without words, pastoral sounds, pictures of
family, and friends, and so forth, and without a specific message. An in-
tuitive contact with anything outside of oneself is a communication.
198 The Musical Quarterly

Artists today do consider the possibility of communication, but be-

cause of a number of reasons they consider it a "given," inherent condition
of existence. You cannot teach people or transmit a specific message with
sounds or paint, but people can personally assimilate and learn a great
deal, but only in their own terms, and, except on a general and superficial
level, those terms are unknowns in the communicative equation. When
something is gained by listening to a piece of music, it has more to do
with the listener than with the composer. The recognition of this fact
is why artists have presented their audience with the most profound com-
munication it is theirs to give-collaboration in the life of the work.
The much criticized and misunderstood "abandonment of responsi-
bility," the seeming attack upon values and disregard for communication
and the audience, have other possibilities of interpretation, as does the
music. We have taken on another kind of responsibility, we are establishing
new values, communications are being sent and received (where the circuits
are still open), and the audience is not nearly as upset as the critics are.
The composer's abdication from total sovereign finite power over the
performer, audience, and work is paradoxically to give the work an infinite
power and universality-an attempt to reach an absolute state of entity-
a multi-ordinal thing.
It is exactly this characteristic of humanness which is putting actual
organic life back into the arts of composition and performance and creating
the most exciting and communicative "environment" for art in any of
the arts today. I used to envy the painters their direct and undivided contact
with the ultimate existent fact of their work; but now I feel that as a com-
poser, having performers an integral dimension of the work puts our art
at the very center of the new total involvement in the generation and ex-
perience of art which is essential today.
My original impulse in this direction of open-form and graphic ambiguity
and performer involvement came from the plastic arts, but I soon saw
that its actual closest parallel was in writing (where the reader is the un-
controllable transformer of the initial act) and its performance process
closest to theater in which the director plays such a profound role between
the playwright and the audience. The potential within this "indirect" con-
tact with the final fact of the work is actually the key to the door of a
new world. It is, however, a new and tremendously difficult responsibility
for the composer, because he can no longer simply demand that he is right
and that his word is the only law. He must simultaneously conceive the
image of his work and all of the ramifications of its effect and life as it
goes out into an infinitely complex world of other people. How can one say
that the composer has abandoned responsibility for his work and the life of
that work? Rather than abandoning the work and ignoring the performer
 New Music 199

and the audience, the composer is attempting to bring all of these elements
into an intense relationship of oneness within the new conception of order
and form, which is new in the sense that it is spontaneously organic and
fulfilled by virtue of its process concept. As ever, if the composer has not
foreseen the environment and process clearly and profoundly in terms
of his materials, the piece will not function well or come to life. Apart
from the indolence and "habit blindness" of performers (which is endemic
to human nature) he must not blame the performers for his lack of aware-
ness and completeness of conception.
To summarize my own particular reasons for becoming involved in
new notational systems and performance processes such as "mobility,"
"open-form," and spontaneous performer determinations in works like
November 1952, December 1952, and so forth; the necessity arose from
the following problems and desires:
1. Belief that the complexity and subtlety of the desired sound results
had passed the point at which standard notation could practically and
reasonably express and describe the desired result.
2. The above belief led to a relaxation of finite notational controls and
to the conscious inclusion of ambiguity in "generalized" notations with
which the performer and the performance process could collaborate.
3. The search for inherent or "process" mobility in the work. The work
as an endlessly transforming and generating "organism," conceptually
unified in its delivery (the influence of the work of Calder).
4. The above necessitates a search for the "conditional" performance state
of spontaneous involvement, responsible to the composed materials
and to the poetic conception of the work; "work" in this case being
the activity of producing as well as the acquisition of a finite result
(the influence of the work of Pollock).
5. The fundamental motivation for all of the above: to produce a "multi-ordi-
nal" communicative activity between the composer, the work, and the per-
former, and a similarly "open" potential of experience for the listener.
The complex word, "multi-ordinal" seems to me to contain the basic
character of communication and meaning to which much of art is addressing
itself today. (Joyce speaks of it relative to concepts of Vico.) The effects
of this concept are overt in the work of Joyce, Mallarme, Stein, Duchamp,
Ernst, Calder, Pollock (to mention only those who were my primary con-
tacts with it), and now in music.
I will presume to say that this is where we are now and where art is most
deeply concerned today in its attempt to "express our time." For me, this
poetic necessity is responsible for the re-viewing of notational performance
practice.
200 The Musical Quarterly

Appendix

It would seem that it is time that an attempt was made to understand

some of the differences of operation within the gross generalization
"aleatoric music" and that they were recognized as the different aesthetic
points of view they express. Taking for the moment only what appear to
be the first and most extreme examples of this genre, the work of John
Cage, Morton Feldman, and myself, and restricting the "sample" roughly
to the years 1951 to 1953, there are these significant differences in principle
which are relative to both notation and performance as they have come
to be:
Cage was, and still is as far as I know, using chance operations as a
compositional technique, which is to say, a rational, lawful, disciplined,
system of objectively assembling sound materials. The controversial point
seems to be that he does not, during the composing, exert subjective control
over the continuity of the sound events. He does, of course, "program"
the operation of the chance technique, but I believe that this is done in
an objective relationship to the materials. When completed, the composition
was a continuity by chance but notationally very strictly measured and
timed (the time structure having come before the continuity was produced),
and to be performed with the use of a stopwatch, and, as much as any
music, sounding the same in each performance. (The Piece for Twelve
Radios, while formally the same in each performance, is by nature "en-
vironmental" in content.) It seems to me that in this case the term "chance
music" can be accurately and properly applied; chance as a compositional
technique for objectively arriving at events and continuity. As Cage utilized
chance, it eliminated subjective decisions on the part of the composer
and the performer and produced musical compositions within a closed
time structure.
In some of the music of Feldman a very different but to a certain extent
aleatoric element was operating. The "graph" music of Feldman was called
that because it was literally written on graph paper; it is not particularly
"graphic" in the European sense. The register of the piano was divided into
three frequency "fields" of high, middle, and low, and within each of these
areas (not necessarily simultaneous) "boxes" would indicate numerically
the number of notes to be played in that register by the pianist. As I under-
stand it, the structure and attack density in these pieces were very sub-
jectively and painstakingly arrived at by the composer. The actual pitches
to be played were, however, left to the performers' choice; again, one would
imagine, a subjective choice. There was also a degree of performer determi-
nation as to the actual point of attack of the notes (rhythm) within both
the compositional and performance actions but within strict structural
 New Music 201

limits and the formal outlines are controlled, as in Cage, by the composer,
but here a subjective control rather than the objective or chance control.
This is obviously aleatoric but not at all "chance" music, either in the
compositional or the performance processes.
In my own work (primarily in Folio and Twenty-Five Pages) the form
is left "open" (ultimately arrived at as a function of the actual performance
process) and, in Folio, the content is "graphically" implied and left to the
performers' immediate spontaneous determination, in any continuity and
by any instruments. In Twenty-Five Pages, the content is totally composed
but left "flexible" and subject to immediate decisions as to structure and
continuity; "open form" but controlled content, inherently variable (sub-
jectively) within the conditions of "mobility" set by myself as composer.
As in Feldman, it is aleatoric but with the subjective, spontaneous element
applied to a form process rather than to content.