Page 59 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

48 The topography of composing work

Music notation systems are not comparable to verbal languages because they
contain hardly any references to the extra-musical (see Kneif 1973: 137). To that
extent, notation signs are not symbols referring to something complex and con-
cealed, but primarily encoded instructions to act. Hence music notation systems
are described as partial writing systems. They enable us to notate things that
cannot be captured with verbal language. There are two main types of notation
system: action notations and sound notations. Action notations direct musicians
in what they have to do. Karlheinz Essl used such notations in his piece “Her-
becks Versprechen” (see Figures 4.4 and 4.5, Chapter 4). For this work, he
developed a new electronic instrument, for which “there is no real notation. I
have a kind of action writing with commentary, where I know what I’mdoing
but at the same time the commentary always explains or reminds me what
should happen in terms of sounds.” Sound notations, by contrast, mainly refer to
sound results. The two types of notation system have to some extent grown
closer to each other over the course of their historical development, so that some
action notations now hint at sound conceptions or even integrate sound nota-
tions, and vice versa (see Mahnkopf 2003: 54f.). Bertl Mütter works not only
with conventional note signs, but also incorporates images into his scores, as he
explained during his interview about his composition “dsudl (das schwere und
das leichte)” (2011). It happens, he says, that he tells his musicians:

Right, now we’ll play this picture here from the Prinzhorn Collection [a
famous collection of art brut]. […] There are so many … irritations. I
would write “Your ad could appear here” in a score. […] There are so
many possibilities and ideas. Of course [he points at an illustration in his
score], some things are notated gesturally too, such as – it’s a Brownian
motion of molecules.

As this example shows, images can notate things that cannot be captured
using musical signs.
Every music notation system and every actual score contain numerous
indeterminables and imponderables, which can ultimately only be worked on
during rehearsals. Indications on dynamics, for instance, are always relative.
Timbre and the balance between instruments are also difficult to notate pre-
cisely. And as with the different communication practices we described in
composers’ interactions with musicians (language, gestures, singing, etc.),
there are similar strategies for dealing with notation systems. Every notation
system has its limits for representing musical ideas, and thus tends to restrict
musical thinking at the same time. Every notation system, however, also
expands the limits of every other notation system. This once again demon-
strates the cognitive pluralism already discussed: several forms of articulation
are used, which complement one another by partially removing each other’s
limitations.
Hence it is only partly true that scores can be characterised as sets of
instructions. Scores are sequences of signs, which always open up a space of