Chapter Nine

The Beginning of
Happiness
Approaching Scores in Graphic
and Text Notation

Virginia Anderson
Experimental Music Catalogue

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. Dante, however,

carries us much farther than that. He, too, has knowledge of what is possible
and impossible. (Santayana 1910, 204)

introduction
Experimental music is fascinating; scores in text and graphic notation are
entrancing. It is as exciting to play, read, and ponder experimental notation
as it is to analyse the most exquisite Romantic masterwork or the most com-
plex Darmstadt score. Other scholars do not share my fascination, however,
due either to personal taste or perhaps to the mistaken belief that these scores,
often described as conceptual art, are too simple to explain in any detail. I can-
not do anything about personal taste, but I feel that if these scores were so
simple, they would have been explained better. Experimental scores have been
displayed like art; they are often realised without imagination; in too many
cases, descriptions of this music are vague, inapplicable, or wrong.
Experimental music deserves serious attention.1 Artists who wrote and pre-
miered scores in the extreme indeterminacy of the 1960s performed them
with vibrant creativity and clever lateral thinking. Like Dante, they explored
the division of the possible and impossible in notational indeterminacy. They
knew graphic and text score types and their variants. They were keenly aware of
the roles of the composer, performer, and listener; what each actor took in and
what each one made. They explored not only the score but also the implica-
tions of its indeterminacy. To understand this music today as the practitioners

1 There are many types of music called “experimental.” “Experimental music” in this chapter refers to
Cagean indeterminacy, alternative notations, early minimalism, artistic crossovers, and philosophical
tenets from ca. 1951–71, as described in Nyman (1974) 1999.

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