Douglas C. Wadle: Thoughts on Notation

Within the tradition of musical composition that is involved with the act of notation, we may say that the most fundamental activity of the composer is a setting forth, in some fixed physical form, of symbols. That these symbols are understood by convention to be proscriptive of some action resulting in a sound is subsequent to this initial fact. The great revelation of the notational experiments of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman is that this unconscious acceptance of the symbols of musical notation as signifying specific, predictable sounds as imagined by the composer may be called into question. Their intentions were to point to the infinite variability of any interpretation of a notation and to engage the performer in creative acts, taking certain elements of choice (the arrangement of particular sounds) out of the hands of the composer. In other words, to provide a situation in which the thing that is the work takes two forms, an event and a document, the document becoming the province of the composer, the event the province of the performer

Here, notation, itself, has become a legitimate area of aesthetic concern for the composer. Cage, Feldman, and Brown were clear that their works were to be interpreted as scores, not as visual art. I am more inclined to argue that my explorations in this area are no less one than the other and something else, besides – a blurring of the lines between musical composition, visual art, and experimental literature, arriving at notation as an aesthetic ordering and manipulation of symbolic structures embedded in a work.  These gain their artistic interest from the richness of their possible decodings, whether such decodings be musical realizations or some other performance medium; whether they be literary, analytical, or some other fixed form of documentation; or whether they exist solely in the mind of the decoder.

The score becomes an object of intellectual engagement, the results of which are predictable only through the studied manipulation of the signs contained therein, a predictability of substantial limitations. In short, the score is conceived to instigate a thought process that may be guided though not proscribed, by the symbols and the means of their representation that constitute the score.