Before I fully formalised my idea for this project I decided to do some research on graphical scores, history and also just find some inspirations for this project.
One big inspiration and also where I had first seen a graphical score in media was the Swedish movie ‘Sound of Noise’ in which one scene the composer for the group spend the night creating this long graphical score. What interested me was how in this movie was of course the music and how it was created. It reminds me of the idea I’m trying to represent in my work but in reverse. The movie recontextualises noise to create music, whereas I’m trying to recontextualise music to create noise.
Another small inspiration for this project was a song by Ben Howard ‘Finders Keepers’. It’s a big departure from Ben Howard’s normal style of music but I think it’s a great and strange harmony between noise and tonal music.
I wanted to find examples of graphical schools outside of the examples we’ve seen lesson, and I came across John Cage’s ‘Fontana Mix’ and Steve Reich’s ‘Pendulum Music’
‘Fontana Mix’ is a graphical score that consists of 10 transparencies with lines layered over a representation of a four-track cassette tape. This score is a great inspiration to me as it’s really practical, all the information for the piece is there and while it’s up for interpretation, there is clearly a right interpretation. I would say it’s akin to something like a spectrogram and it’s kind of the direction I want to go with my piece in terms of how it’s meant to be interpreted. While I think isn’t a good reason for every variable to be accounted for in my graphical score, I want to make it clear that there is a correct way to perform it, or at the very least it can be performed incorrectly. I think that’s clearly shown when you listen to ‘Fontana Mix’ because it sounds exactly how it looks despite the sounds themselves not being set in stone.
‘Pendulum Music’ is quite similar to ‘Fontana Mix’ if we look at it from the perspective that there is a right way to perform the composition; however, as shown it’s a completely different type of graphical score. Instead of being a literal display of the piece itself, it’s an itinerary of how to perform it. What I find interesting about this piece is that it doesn’t start when the sound starts, instead it’s a performance more than it is necessarily just a sound piece. I also love the way Reich frames the graphical score in respect to how it created such an elaborate setup that only amounts to maybe less than a minute’s worth of actual ‘sound art’, yet the line “performers then sit down to watch and listen to the process along with the audience,” makes it sound as if swinging of the mikes would last an eternity. One thing I really want to incorporate into my work from this is how all the tools to perform the composition are given; however, the way it sounds is discovered by everyone for the first time only when the piece is being performed. Despite that, one thing I don’t want to do is put words into my graphical score, partly because I wouldn’t want it to be limited to English speakers but also because making clear senses isn’t something which comes naturally, as one can easily tell.
I find it interesting to research a topic when I want to discover the process of it not necessarily the meanings behind it, and I’d like to think that this research has been fruitful as it has defined more what the graphical part of my score will actually look like.