Virginia Anderson

sit down and go through the motions of performance. Similarly, Nattiez and Cook
insist on a pianist and an array of actions. None of these indications appear in
the score; rather, they have been built up in performance practice. At the same
time, 4’33”, in its three versions, is far more diverse in its execution than these
writers imply. The Peters version—the one used by most performers—states
that 4’33” can be performed on any instrument or combination of instruments,
and for any time length. The Woodstock version, lost but reconstructed by
David Tudor, shows no instrumentation, nor does the Kremen. I have directed
a band 4’33”, played E flat clarinet solo 4’33”. Recently I played the 33” first
movement on piano using Tudor’s gestures, which is an excerpt, but I could
equally have titled it 33” by John Cage, which is a whole piece. An audience
is not required; on his mushroom hunt, Cage performed this piece alone and
mentally. Moreover, these performances are not arrangements of 4’33”, in
the way that Ravel’s orchestral Pictures at an Exhibition is an arrangement of
Mussorgsky’s piano piece; these are real, observant 4’33” performances.
As Hobbs suggested, describing a normal “masterwork” such as Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony only by its initiation and finish would be ludicrous. To justify
treating an indeterminate score in such a cavalier manner, the analyst would
either have to accept that it was categorically different (i.e., not a notation or
a score), or that it was qualitatively different (i.e., occasional or conceptual).
According to Nelson Goodman, indeterminate text and graphic scores are not
notations. Goodman took a section of Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra
(1958) that has the “line and dot” notation that Cage used in the late 1950s and
early 1960s. Performers measure dots (events) by their orientation in lines indi-
cating dynamics, duration, frequency, and so on. Goodman thought that this
system “is not notational; for without some stipulation of minimal significant
units of angle and distance, syntactic differentiation is wanting” (1976, 188). If
so, few, if any, graphic and text scores are notational, as there is no fixed syn-
tactic differentiation.9 This, however, means that indeterminate music exists
in a kind of limbo—neither notational nor purely contemplative—a state that
is not borne out in practice. As text and graphic pieces are created by people
and passed on paper for others to play, they work too much like scores to be
solely improvisational; their idea transmission is too much like notation to be
purely conceptual. Nattiez’s and Cook’s generalisations may imply that music
in text and graphic notation is too ephemeral and unimportant to be exam-
ined closely, which constitutes a personal, aesthetic judgement. If what Goehr
calls the post-1800 work-concept is the standard for quality, then indetermi-
nate pieces are inferior when judged against it. However, Goehr specifically
rejects this kind of judgement as “conceptual imperialism” (Goehr 1992, 270).
She states that the post-1800 work-concept dominates our understanding and
blinds us to the appreciation of music outside it. Instead, I prefer a pragmatic,
cultural definition: a score (or notation or composition) is a score (or notation

9 I have shown elsewhere (Anderson 2006, 312–313) that Carl Dahlhaus’s definition of a “composition”
as being fixed for performance and transferable as an aesthetic object to the listener (in Lewis 1996, 96)
shows inconsistent results when applied to text and graphic pieces.

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