After a bit of deliberation, I’ve decided to go down the route of graphical scores. There are two main reasons why I want to create a graphical score piece for this project. The first is because I have deep roots in the visual arts and fine art. In most of the projects I’ve done so far for this course, I’ve always made a visual stimulus to focus my thoughts and to remind myself of my vision for the respective project. There would always be something visual that informs my work, so I thought it only made sense to make a graphical score for this project.
My second reason is that I’ve found a way to make creating a graphical score thoroughly interesting for myself, and I think the best way to describe that realisation is to recount what happened during our lesson on graphical scores, the quick graphical score I made in that lesson and the logical conclusions I came to in the end.
In the lesson, I understood that a graphical score was classically used as an alternative score, like TAB technically, but has also been used more abstractly. Multiple projects I’ve done in the past came to mind because of this, especially the one where I used my fine art as spectrograms and then edited the dynamic range and relative frequencies to manipulate the art itself. I couldn’t do the same project again because that would be boring so I thought about my previous projects some more and then I came across a digital painting of a ‘Tascam 38 Eight Track Tape Recorder’ that I never finished.
While the magnetic tape wasn’t an idea within my graphical score, it did get me to think about shellac records and loops. The idea of a cyclical piece in which ideas are introduced and constantly repeat but never change themselves became the basis of my graphical score.
As you can tell this score isn’t very graphical, in fact, it looks more like a key to a map than it does a composition of music; however, I think that it would be very interesting to explain the initial idea.
The main premise was that there would be four different loops from four different instruments which would play at different tempos as well as having different lengths in terms of notes or ‘transients’. There would also be someone who keeps the tempo and guides each instrument as they would come in in a cannon, as vaguely explained on the sheet. An idea I added on top of the main premise which the accenting of notes at specific times. This would mean that each performer would accent the notes in a loop that would correspond with the number of instruments in play. For instance, with one instrument in play the first or ‘1’ note would be accented and when the second instrument came in the second or ‘2’ note would be accented instead.
As one who has a great interest in coding as well as puzzles, this graphical score came to me in flash but I soon realised that performing such a score was exceedingly difficult, as it would soon be seen when my score was picked to be performed last and no one understood what to do.
While I found no fault with the performance by my classmates because my ‘instructions’ were very vague and not what anyone was expecting, it did frustrate me that my idea hadn’t come to full fruition, which is why I want to do a proper graphical score for this project.
I plan to make a set of rules before I actually make my piece, with the same core idea taken to its logical extreme. My aim is to fully flesh out my interpretation of my idea but have a graphical score that leaves enough room for anyone to have their take on my ‘composition’.
But why do I want to make a piece like this. the group idea whose project is change; however, when I get excited with the process I kind of leave the ‘higher meaning’, so this is my take on the topic of change.
My piece is trying to show how things can change in context, taking sequences do not change throughout the piece however their relationships with each other change creating a new relationship.