Rehearsing Indeterminate Scores

In my last article, I talked about how the practice of teaching, composing, and performing graphic scores represented an “innovation” in the specific meaning of that term used by Arthur Levine to describe a model of institutional practice that the host institution regards as outside its defined identity. Such innovations can be terminated in several ways: the institution may expand its identity to encompass the innovation, or may reject the innovation outright and shut it down, or (as I argued was the case here) may tolerate the innovation continuing to exist as an isolated enclave within (or rather, adjacent to) the host institution.

Here, I want to talk about another sort of institution, and describe in more detail just what practices are attendant to graphic scores that would make them incompatible with it. In this case, I’m not talking about a tangible institution like the Hochschule für Musik, but rather the abstract institution of new-music culture. This includes an array of overlapping institutions, both tangible and abstract, and in this way is probably more like something akin to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as an “assemblage.” That is, it’s a collection of identities that may themselves also be collections of identities, and may overlap and may not, but for our purposes can be described with one overarching identifier. In this case, for convenience sake I’ll refer to this as “new music,” but what I mean by that term will include abstract things like “how to teach musicians” or “how to critique a performance” but also tangible things like radio programs and concert schedules and the plans orchestra managers make for rehearsals.

The reason I want to take time to talk about this is because we have a lot of assumptions about how, for example, one should practice and rehearse a piece of music in order to present a satisfactory performance to a viewing/listening public. These assumptions rest on beliefs we have about what’s important about a piece of music and how this apparatus of rehearsal and performance operates to convey that important thing to others.

For example, one of our underlying assumptions about music is that it’s an artistic medium in which “meaning” is conveyed through sound. In that perspective, the way you rehears is 1) play the piece, 2) listen to yourself as you play, and (crucially) 3) compare what you hear to what you imagine you should hear by reading the notated sheet music. A good musician practices in order to bring their performance into compliance with the notation, and then to apply their own artistic taste to elaborate on that. The central task of practicing a piece is to bring the performance in line with the notation; that is, to play what’s written and (as best one can) to avoid mistakes either of a technical nature (wrong notes, wrong tempo, out of tune) or of a stylistic one (wrong amount of vibrato, wrong articulations, wrong intonation).

But all of this assumes that music conveys its meaning through specific sounds, so that if you play some other sounds, you won’t convey the meaning of the piece. An enormous amount of the training to be a musician lies in practicing technical skills in order to reproduce a notated score correctly, so that whatever meaning the composer is trying to convey with these notes, and not some others, is faithfully transmitted.

But as I’ve pointed out several times here, and has been a major part of the discourse surrounding twentieth-century music, is that sounds do not, in themselves, have any meaning. Whatever meaning they have is culturally and socially contingent: I (as composer) say that these sounds mean something. I could just as easily assign that same meaning to any other sounds arbitrarily. As John Cage pointed out, now over seventy years ago, the meaning occurs in the person who hears the sounds, not in the sounds themselves.

So how do you convey meaning in music, when the choice of sound is entirely arbitrary? This is the loose thread of our music-culture that graphic scores are tugging at, and once you start pulling at it (as I did when I started working with these scores) the whole institution of music-culture starts to unravel. To wit: if a piece of music is going to sound different every time you play it—and not just the same melody in different tonalities, or using different instruments, or rearranging the sounds in time, but completely different sounds: anything from traffic noise to the sound of machinery to rain in the forest to percussive techniques played on the inside of a piano—how does that piece still function to convey a consistent meaning?

I’ve argued already that I think the key to this kind of music may be found in reflecting on the way our thinking changes while in the process of confronting new, unknown musical events; that is, of negotiating some new intrigue set forth by the score. The process of resolving that intrigue, and the changes we undergo in that process, is the closest analogue I can imagine to what we think of as “meaning” in reproducible art-forms. For me, then, the question is: how do you rehearse that?

I found some interesting results as I was interviewing people for my research project this summer: both the historical accounts from people who studied with Karkoschka in the 60s and 70s, and testimony about present-day rehearsal practice when using graphic scores as a teaching tool.

From my interview with Dietburg Spohr:

DS: Mich hätte es eben interessiert, wie, denn die, sagen wir, die sogenannten grafischen Partituren sind ja fast immer so, dass du es selber erfinden musst, was das bedeutet. …

Das blieb eigentlich immer der Fantasie überlassen. Also wir haben ganz unterschiedliche Auslegungen dann gemacht von der Sache. Also von was auch immer wir dann hatten. Und das war sehr interessant, dass man dann, der Weg ist dann so, dass jede von den Sängern sich sozusagen dann damit einverstanden erklären muss, wie sie eine Zeichnung auslegt.

NAW: Also das habt ihr untereinander besprochen.

DS: Ja, nur immer in der Gruppe.

My translation:

DS: It was always interesting to me, how … because they (let’s say) so-called graphic scores are almost always so, that you have to discover for yourself, what it means. …

It was always left to fantasy. That is, we made entirely different interpretations of the thing. That is, from whatever we had. And it was always very interesting, that you— that the way it works was that each of the singers had to come to an understanding, so to speak, with how she interpreted a drawing.

NAW: So, you always discussed that among yourselves.

DS: Yes, always in the group.

There’s a two-stage process at work here that’s important to note: first, the singers simply improvised, freely associating and interpreting the score however they chose in the moment. But second, they discussed among themselves how they chose to interpret the score, and to come to some sort of understanding with their own creative decisions.

This same process was described (a bit more sardonically) by Carol Morgan:

Ich meine, ich war total naiv, ich hatte keine Ahnung, was es war, und Karkoschka hat [eben?] immer diese Impulse gegeben. Aber er hat diese Impulse gegeben und eigentlich dabei gelassen.

Und zunächst einmal, wir haben geblödelt, ehrlich gesagt. Aber dann ist es bei uns zu blöd. Jeder hat ein bisschen aussortiert, was er dann tatsächlich macht.

My translation:

I mean, I was totally naïve, I had no idea what it was, and Karkoschka always gave these stimuli. But he would give these stimuli and then he’d just leave it.

And in the beginning we were just fooling around, to be honest. But then it was too foolish for us. Each of us had to sort out, what they were actually doing.

Here, two, we see the same two-stage process (though more by accident): improvising and fooling around, and then a sorting-out of the outcome to arrive at some unexpected end result.

This seems to me to be an emergent practice for how to perform these kinds of scores; but if it is, it has significant consequences for how music is taught, what’s considered a “successful” realization of the score, or how a critic might judge a performance. What’s important here is no longer the specific outcome, but how the musicians arrive at it.

Interestingly for me, this method was substantiated as an effective tool in my interview with Uli Fussenegger, who’s been teaching and leading workshops on graphic scores for decades. Here he’s describing how he uses graphic scores as a teaching tool with younger musicians (think a classical-music student who’s never seen, much less played, music from the mid-twentieth century):

Und ich denke, was auch wahnsinnig, also was ich auch oft mache, eigentlich ist dann in der Probe mal fünf Minuten aufzunehmen, sich das gemeinsam anzuhören und es gemeinsam zu besprechen. Und da kommt es eben darauf an, dass man schafft, eine kommunikative Atmosphäre zu kreieren, wo die Leute die Möglichkeit haben, offen zu sprechen, ohne dass jemand irgendwie sich unangenehm fühlt oder dass sie auch den richtigen Ton finden.

Aber dass man wirklich auch auf diesen Punkt kommt, der unterschiedlichen Perspektiven, wie man das Gleiche hört, weil das natürlich indirekt sich aufs Spielen auswirkt. Und das hilft auch darin zu sehen, okay, es gibt kein richtig oder falsch.

My translation:

I think, what’s crazy… what I’ll often do is, there in the rehearsal just record [a realization] for five minutes, listen to it together and discuss it. And this leads to creating a communicative atmosphere, where people haben the possibility to speak openly without anybody somehow feeling uncomfortable or having to find the right “tone.”

But to really come to this point, of different perspectives on how you hear the same thing, because that naturally has an indirect effect on your playing. And it really helps in this to see, “OK, there’s no right or wrong.”

So here we find the same process—improvise, listen, reflect, repeat—now being used as an explicit tool for teaching improvisation skills (Uli, it bears noting, is currently at the Sonic Spaces cluster at the Musikakademie Basel, which has an extensive and innovative program built around improvisation). This would seem to validate that process as a method for performing music in indeterminacy. But how reliable is it?

I want to test this process as an explicit method, and fortunately I might have the opportunity in the coming months. I’ve been in touch with a few ensembles here in Berlin, and one of them is interested in taking part in this project, acting as research subjects for a sort of experimental rehearsal process.

I want to approach this as an explicit method, and document the process as a sort of sociological study: that means audio/video documentation of the rehearsals, interviews with the participants, analysis of the interview texts, and publishing the results in some scholarly journal. It’s a hefty batch of work to do the project well, but it’s important to me to be able to justify this as a robust rehearsal method. As I said above, graphic scores challenge a lot of our underlying assumptions about how music works, and one essential part of that is how we teach music in our academies. If I’m going to propose a method that works through a very different method, based on different underlying assumptions, I want to be able to substantiate that claim with robust, verifiable research.