Notations 21: Breaking the Boundaries

I went with my friend Liz to the Chelsea Art Museum yesterday for the second performance in the “Notations 21” concert series.

I guess the common thread of this exhibit and series is “innovative notation” where the musical notation itself is a work of art (see the above image) just as much as the music performed. The order of performers were Will Redman doing solo percussion for Book; Katherine Young on bassoon and Jonathan Zorn on double bass and electronics for their piece Untitled for Bass, Bassoon and Electronics; David Means on wind controller and live processing for his piece Folding Music II for solo wind instrument; Anthony Ptak on copper pipe, ekphonetic instrument and theramin antenna for his Insistentia.08; and Liz’s friend Stuart Saunders Smith’s piece Transitions and Leaps performed by The Sylvia Smith Percussion Duo (Sylvia Smith and Ayano Kataoka).

We had a nice chat with Stuart Saunders Smith and Sylvia. Stuart told me about when he heard Allen Ginsberg read Howl and how the performance of it really brought it to life moreso than just reading his text on the page which launched us into a discussion of the dual task of poetry needing to be both successful on the page as a written work with form and shape and successful when read out loud as a performed work unravelling in space and time as its word music gives pleasure and conveys meaning to the ear.

We had a discussion at the end about the Stuart Saunders Smith score and how to read it:

The score is designed so that any performer (you need at least two) could enact this piece using whatever instruments or objects or text they wanted. All it requires is figuring out the notation’s ideograms that symbolize how to go about a task to be done: erratic, repeated pattern, greater intensity, etc. The score is grouped into “event constructs” and the performers have to pick a series of tasks or categories (A, B, C and D) consisting of sounds or actions. The “event constructs” help you get from taks A to task D either through a transition or a leap known as an “And Event” where the two performers trade and do their individual A-D tasks in unison. Quite fascinating and inspirational to Liz and me as we think about our next collaboration.