Unnecessarily complicated scores?

So I came across a young composer that I really liked the other day (Christopher Cerrone if anyone's interested) and decided that maybe he knew some other up-and-coming composers that would be worth a listen. I checked out the first person he listed under his links and came to this score. I listened to the MP3 and it was okay, but I couldn't make heads or tails out of the actual score. I admit, I spend very little time looking at other people's sheet music but this is probably one of the most confusing bits of music I've ever seen. I can't help but wonder, was there really no other way to write this out? Was this truly the most effective and efficient way to let the performer know what they should play?

There's a quote about Schoenberg that I can only paraphrase and I can't actually remember who said it but it goes something like, "Schoenberg was more interested in the notes on the page than the actual music." I get the feeling that this is the case with a lot of well-educated composers, especially those with avant-garde leanings. There's something to be said for making up new notations for a new technique but sometimes it appears that composers expect someone to learn an entirely new language just to play their music when they could have accomplished something nearly identical by using more common notation.

I dunno, I thought this whole idea might make a good topic.

S... came to this score. ... I couldn't make heads or tails out of the actual score. ...Was this truly the most effective and efficient way to let the performer know what they should play?

This is the score...not the parts. The most effective way to let a performer know what they should play is for them to read their part (which would have only the information relevant to their instrument).

The score is for conducting/rehearsal purposes ... The tendency now is to hide staves when they're not playing anything, hence all the white-space. The dashed lines allow quick and easy understanding of structure and form, so one can know where it goes next, what lines up and when.

:whistling:

The rest of it is just music - rather advanced notation, with which the performers would need to be familiar... BUT, the score isn't needlessly complicated, it all has a point.

This is the score...not the parts. The most effective way to let a performer know what they should play is for them to read their part (which would have only the information relevant to their instrument).

The score is for conducting/rehearsal purposes ... The tendency now is to hide staves when they're not playing anything, hence all the white-space. The dashed lines allow quick and easy understanding of structure and form, so one can know where it goes next, what lines up and when.

:whistling:

The rest of it is just music - rather advanced notation, with which the performers would need to be familiar... BUT, the score isn't needlessly complicated, it all has a point.

What's the point then?

I know that's an impossible question to sum up in one sentence or even one paragraph but it's meant to be somewhat rhetorical. I mean, I can understand leaving the blank space but follow just the viola line for instance, even just the bit of it on page 3. Was that the easiest way to write out this part? Unless you have a masters in music performance yourself, I'm guessing there's a good chance that 90% of the symbols written, in just that short section, you would have to look up. If there was truly no other way to represent the desired sound, that's fine, but it seems awfully unlikely to be the case to me.

PS. 90% is an exaggeration, before anyone jumps down my throat about that.

Christopher Cerrone is great. Nice guy. His scores are not overly complicated. That is all.

I can read it just fine, btw.

Christopher Cerrone is great. Nice guy. His scores are not overly complicated. That is all.

I can read it just fine, btw.

The score wasn't his. I've checked out his scores and, while he uses some unique notation, he seems to keep things pretty easy to understand. That's kind of my point too. His music certainly isn't simple, but he doesn't need to use complicated notation to accomplish this.

What's the point then?

...I can understand leaving the blank space but follow just the viola line for instance, even just the bit of it on page 3. ...

I don't get your point.

This is just the score - the point is that it's a clear visual representation of everything that's going on ... The viola part won't have anything else on it, so the players don't have to worry about deciphering the specifics. In this case, the score is, again, only for conductor/rehearsal purposes - so they can see instantly everything that's going on.

I don't get your point.

This is just the score - the point is that it's a clear visual representation of everything that's going on ... The viola part won't have anything else on it, so the players don't have to worry about deciphering the specifics. In this case, the score is, again, only for conductor/rehearsal purposes - so they can see instantly everything that's going on.

I understand that this is all the parts and not what each individual would be looking at. You seem to be implying that each individual part would look different in every way imaginable from what it looks like on the full score. This is why I pointed out just a couple measures of one instrument, because it seems safe to assume that this individual player would see something similar for just those few measures for just their instrument. That part alone is quite difficult for me to read and I assume, maybe falsely, that the same is true for most people.

If I'm completely off and the viola score, by itself, would look so ridiculously different from the viola part on the full score that it would be fully understandable to even the most inexperienced sight-reader then the conversation is over. Or, if I'm mistaken and most people would be able to sight-read these individual parts in their sleep, then I guess that ends the conversation as well. Either way, unless I'm reading you wrong, you don't have to be so condescending about it.

Now, if I'm not so far off in my assumptions, then my point is, why does this have to be written out in such a complicated manner? Do we really need triplets nestled inside of triplets with a few dotted 32nd note rests strewn about the same area or could this have been done in a simpler fashion and still achieved the same effect?

Cutout scores, meh, there are advantages and disadvantages. But the other elements of this score are eye candy.

First of all flagging beams over rests:

Is usually eye-cluttering and pretentious. I can't imagine how it could EVER be helpful in a piece that doesn't have beats.

The notation is musical onanism. It's just plain indefensible. Take the flute ten-tuplet on p6. No one else is playing, there is no steady meter, and the tuplet is immediately followed by a 2-second rest. Why write those notes as a tentuplet? It will NEVER be audible as one. What he wrote was seven fast notes followed by a two second pause. But he notated it as a tentuplet to be an insufferable jackass. :whistling: Or I suppose in modernist language, to "express compositional control over the musical medium."

There's something to be said for making up new notations for a new technique but sometimes it appears that composers expect someone to learn an entirely new language just to play their music.

I think the composer expects to be able to sell several signed framed copies of his pretty "musical pictures" to hang in Upper West Side lofts at hundreds of dollars a pop, because that's the only source of income or renown he will ever get from this over-inked disaster.

...You seem to be implying that each individual part would look different in every way imaginable from whatt ilooks like on the full score. This is why I pointed out just a couple measures of one instrument, because it seems safe to assume that this individual player would see something similar...That part alone is quite difficult for me to read

Oh...gotcha.

So it's not the structural formatting of the score, it's the actual notation.

In that case, I tend to agree... It's difficult, and requires an INTENSELY focused musicians, well versed in such advanced notational techniques... AND, I expect (not having heard it) that there's serveral ways to get similar textures...

The trick is ectracting the sound you want, without overloading the players with unnecessary information.

I think the idea of this score is to keep it as simple as possible for each performer - and to aid the conductor or rehearsal director in keeping the idea together. The reason for all the funkiness is that the instruments are playing in different tempi - and there are certain areas of indeterminacy, such as those long fermata'd rests. So Wollschlager breaks the score down into its constituent tempo-parts, and lines them up with arrows. It's really not too hard to read.

Beethoven's musicians also complained all the time that he wrote stuff that was "impossible to play", that he was being a dictatorial control-freak with no concern for his players and many more such things. There have always been people who complained about some new developments (in orchestration, notation, or otherwise) being separated from reality, and sometimes they may have had a point. Often it was indeed somewhat separated from the reality that existed at that time and at that place.

But over time the performers learned to cope with such entirely new issues. They learned to play dynamics exactly as asked for in the score, to play with different distinct articulations. They extended their ranges. They learned to play more complex rhythms. String players learned to read the now rather firmly established notations for harmonics. And mostly during the 20th century, performers learned the more common notations of quartertones, and how to play them, they learned to cope with often changing meters, they learned to differentiate between various form of the fermata sign to designate different durations, they learned to read space notation, they learned to identify and play notations of wind multiphonics, Bart

Beethoven's musicians also complained all the time that he wrote stuff that was "impossible to play", that he was being a dictatorial control-freak with no concern for his players and many more such things. There have always been people who complained about some new developments (in orchestration, notation, or otherwise) being separated from reality, and sometimes they may have had a point. Often it was indeed somewhat separated from the reality that existed at that time and at that place.

But over time the performers learned to cope with such entirely new issues. They learned to play dynamics exactly as asked for in the score, to play with different distinct articulations. They extended their ranges. They learned to play more complex rhythms. String players learned to read the now rather firmly established notations for harmonics. And mostly during the 20th century, performers learned the more common notations of quartertones, and how to play them, they learned to cope with often changing meters, they learned to differentiate between various form of the fermata sign to designate different durations, they learned to read space notation, they learned to identify and play notations of wind multiphonics, Bart

Cutout scores, meh, there are advantages and disadvantages. But the other elements of this score are eye candy.

First of all flagging beams over rests:

Is usually eye-cluttering and pretentious. I can't imagine how it could EVER be helpful in a piece that doesn't have beats.

The notation is musical onanism. It's just plain indefensible. Take the flute ten-tuplet on p6. No one else is playing, there is no steady meter, and the tuplet is immediately followed by a 2-second rest. Why write those notes as a tentuplet? It will NEVER be audible as one. What he wrote was seven fast notes followed by a two second pause. But he notated it as a tentuplet to be an insufferable jackass. :whistling: Or I suppose in modernist language, to "express compositional control over the musical medium."

I think the composer expects to be able to sell several signed framed copies of his pretty "musical pictures" to hang in Upper West Side lofts at hundreds of dollars a pop, because that's the only source of income or renown he will ever get from this over-inked disaster.

hey, hey, hey.

shut up :):)

@JoshMc: Well, there are also many composers who write extremely complex stuff, but have still very "realistic" expectations of their performers, i.e. they know that any performance of their music will never be -exactly- what they wrote (especially not the first performance). But they choose to still "give all the information" on the music as detailed as they have it in mind, leaving it to the performers to reduce it to something they can cope with.

This is actually even a rather interesting perspective in regard of the role of the performer: In a lot of music, where only "a little" information is clearly notated (baroque music, Jazz standards, etc.), the artistic role of the performer is to familiarize her/himself with the music and, depending on the findings, add something on her/his own. Be that embellishments, rubato, dynamics, or even fully-fledged improvisations.

Working with a score that presents a vast "overload" of information is often somewhat the contrary, but similar in effect: Here, the artistic role of the performer turns into again getting familiar with the music, finding an interpretation and comparing what's written with your abilities and then make selections of what elements you choose to lay your focus on, and what aspects you may even ignore. In the end, whether you leave something out or add something, both are entirely personal, artistic decisions that can make a performance of a certain piece unique. And often, of course, you will have a little of both.

I have experienced a chamber music workshop with Ferneyhough where performance students practiced pieces by him and finally played them in a concert. And of -course- none of it was technically absolutely accurate. But the way they seriously approached the music, and tried to their best effort to realize it in a way they found adequate still produced great results and Ferneyhough was quite pleased with how it turned out.

But of course I'm speaking here of music that is even quite a bit more complex than the example mentioned here. The general principle however remains always the same: A composer conceives a certain music - and it is up to her or him to choose between simplifying it to something that she or he -knows- it will be easily performable exactly like that with a minimum of effort; or to leave it close to the original conception, allowing the performers to make their version of a performance they find "playable".

In the first case, you have more control over the performance as a composer. You have the advantage of being able to clearly state what aspects matter most for you and do everything in your power to bring those out. In the second case, you will have to accept that, at least in the beginning, every performance will differ, that some people may refuse to play your piece at all, that people will "misunderstand your intentions" - but you didn't have to take away anything from your piece and every performance will bring out new aspects of it, letting it live many varied lifes - and maybe sooner or later result in performances that may really surprise you in how much they pull out of your piece. These are all questions one has to consider when facing questions such as notation (and pretty much any other aspect of composing).

And obviously, in most cases it will be a mixture of such elements - not even to mention that the question to which "side" of these two it belongs may shift a lot over time, over cultures, and even from performer to performer.

I do think it is a valid question to ask "why can't this be done in a simpler way?". There are actually many times when I thought the same about a composition. But I'm against simply stating this question rhethorically: The question you should be asking yourself should really be why a composer choose not to write it in a "simpler" way, first assuming that she or he did have a reason for doing it a certain way. You may not always find an answer to this question, and if you do it may not be the "right" one, but maybe in some cases that will lead to a discovery of why a certain "unorthodox" form might have been a very appropriate one in some case, while maybe in other cases confirming that a different notation might have been more adequate. But this only works if you give a composition the benefit of the doubt first.

P.S. What's wrong with me and all those insanely long posts? Sorry people…

Good post Gardener.

The point is not really "that's impossible," more "that's meaningless." His instructions aren't hard; they are non-signifying.

You bring up Beethoven... Mahler also gave many instructions in his parts, instructions that may have been unintelligible or seemed dictatorial to his players. But they always were aurally significant. You can tell me to play a note ff or ppppp. I may double-take at that many p's but you're saying "this is an aural effect I want." You may give me a different dynamic or articulation on every note if you want. You may tell me what fingering to play on every note. Each succeeding note can be col legno or sul tasto or whatever you wish. More power to you. But if you tell me to play a note kumquat - that is a meaningless instruction with no aural effect for the listener.

Music notation is and has always been representational. Notation represents sound. All the other arts used to be representational too: paintings OF landscapes or sculptures OF people. Now they've moved away from being directly representational. But paintings are still made of colors and sculptures are still made of shapes. Music is still made of sounds.

If we agree up to this point, then let's continue: a lot of the details in this piece have no effect on the sound. This is a fundamental difference with the supposed "overnotation" of Mahler or Beethoven.

Examples: The cello pizzes are notated as extremely short upbeats. They mostly aren't heard that way. They wouldn't be heard that way even if a sequencer performed the piece 100% accurately, because the human ear just does not subdivide that finely (especially when a steady beat is not present to guide it). The pizzes are heard as indeterminately placed notes against the background of the piano/flute/whatever.

Similarly most of the tuplets in this piece aren't heard as tuplets (and you haven't contested this although you have suggested psychological reasons for notating it this way).

There is no (or nearly no) implication of beat for the listener, therefore beaming notes x and y together is more or less meaningless. He has taken out the time signature and the barlines, why not also take out the beams and note stems and just notate the pitches as note heads. If he wants that "tentuplet" to be faster and "rounder" (as you suggest), then place the dots closer together.

He wouldn't do that, though, because dots on a page looks like less work. It looks maybe a little random. Nested tuplets and notes with 3 or 4 flags: that looks "crafted." It looks meticulously planned and arranged. It highlights how many "compositional choices" he made. It looks like there is more organizational-principle to the music.

Of course what difference does it make? Not much, aurally. All this notational complexity does not add up to an aural result. It is a Rube Goldberg machine that doesn't end up buttering the toast.

"Music" like this is possible, I guess, because we now prize the composer's intent & the composer's process over the music itself. Which is wrong... The composer isn't the music, the process isn't the music, the score isn't the music, even the performance isn't the music. The music is the music :cool:

Your entire assessment seems to me be built on the following prejudice (excuse me for calling it that):

He wouldn't do that, though, because dots on a page looks like less work. It looks maybe a little random. Nested tuplets and notes with 3 or 4 flags: that looks "crafted." It looks meticulously planned and arranged. It highlights how many "compositional choices" he made. It looks like there is more organizational-principle to the music.

Now, this is quite a attack you are making on the composer there. You are basically saying the composer is a pretentious fraud who's doing everything just to "look better". This is a sentiment I have encountered quite a few times and is amongst the things that can upset me most of all things that can be used as insults towards a composer. Most composers I know work hard on their music. They work on in for a long time after carefully considering what they want, they consider how they want to notate it how it may be performed, and OF COURSE how it will sound. Oh, sure, there may be some vanity in all of us, and some of it may sometimes show through in our compositions. But to make the assumption that all such choices you can't personally relate to have no musical reasons and are just there out of vanity is just a slap in the face of a ton of composers. By all means, say that their methods suck, that they're doing everything wrong, that their music is ugly or that their notation is ineffectual - but insinuating that they just do all of this "to look clever, without caring for the music" is, to me, the most severe affront. You are not the only one who cares for the music. Most composers in fact do, surprisingly enough! And this is what I mean by "benefit of the doubt"…

As for music notation as a representation of sound: Well, I don't think it's quite so direct. Notation has always been an extremely poor way of "representing" sound - oral tradition in many times/cultures has often been so much more effective at preserving a desired sound than any written system of notating sounds could be, which is also why music notation was often rejected in its beginning. The point is that a notation is a strong -abstraction- of audible things, that can lean in entirely different directions (from directions of what to -do-, over directions of how the result should -sound-, to mere inspirations for free playing). Musical notation has never been something really clear and standartised because of this ambiguity of different aims. Therefore of course people have always writting apparently "meaningless" things in scores. There are legato slurs in harp or xylophone parts, crescendi on single piano chords, and tons of verbal instructions with no defined musical meaning at all (speaking of Mahler's music). The point in all these cases is that the performers tried to understand the intention behind such apparently meaningless marks and play the part differently in some other, ultimately audible ways.

But somehow you seem to know exactly what is meaningless and what is meaningful. Most of Mahler's verbal annotations are pretty much on the same line as "kumquat", meaning they have no defined sonic quality, yet, according to you, they are "aurally significant". Yet, for some reason, when a composer chooses to beam some notes together without having a beat, that's entirely irrelevant for the musical result. How can you be so sure one thing will have an effect of how a performer plays the piece while the other doesn't?

Just to cover some of your points:

- Where did you get the idea that tuplets should be "heard as tuplets"? Do you mean with that, that the audience hears "ah, a quintuplet"? Aren't -you- confusing notation with the musical result there? A quintuplet is just a way of notating a certain sequence of time intervals, nothing else. And without a context, five eighth notes are absolutely identical to an eighth-note quintuplet. It is entirely irrelevant whether the listener hears it "as a quintuplet" or not - just that this particular rhythm is meant to be played.

- That there's no beat doesn't mean there are no groups of notes, no figures, no gestures etc. I don't know why you're implying that beaming only makes sense when you have beats. It's simply a way of grouping notes together, to create clearly readable forms that can be taken in by the performer as a whole rather than just separate dots. Not even to mention that such grouping makes it all so much easier to read, at least for me. Just imagine a quasi-random sequence of 32nd and 16th notes, all with their individual beams. I'm sure you'd be able to read this much more quicker if they are beamed cleverly. Plus it will create a lot less clutter on the page.

He has taken out the time signature and the barlines, why not also take out the beams and note stems and just notate the pitches as note heads. If he wants that "tentuplet" to be faster and "rounder" (as you suggest), then place the dots closer together.

That seems to imply that there's just the choice between absolute rhythmical accuracy (i.e. strike the fermatas etc.) and absolute space notation. But the thing -between- seems to be the entire rhythmical principle of that piece! A fluctuation between well-defined, clear passages, with some movable buffer zones, a pairing of precisely formulated aspects with some more free things. Just "placing the dots closer" won't make anything "rounder" in how the performer perceives it psychologically. But that's not even my point: My point is that I have only listed one random reason why the composer might have notated it like that. There may be multiple more, or completely different ones, and any approach that immediately goes "he must have meant exactly this and only this, so it must be simplified like that" is likely to miss some aspects of the piece. I don't really know what's so frightening about a 10-tuplet like that so it seems like an absolute necessity to change it… If a performer feels like he can only play it by imagining spaced dots - by all means, then imagine that. And if one's really so worried about a particular notation, approach the composer and ask.

But so fixed ideas about what possibly could be "meaningful" and what couldn't be are just going to close you off to a lot of music. A notational device that means nothing to one performer, may very well have a distinct aural result when played by somebody else. And an aural result that is inaudible for one listener may very well be heard by another.

But really, it's only the overhasty accusation of pretension that really annoys me so much about all of this. Maybe because I've been accused of it too. Possibly.

P.S. "People who listen to classical music are elitist snobs, who don't actually like it, but just want to look educated."

Now, this is quite a attack you are making on the composer there. You are basically saying the composer is a pretentious fraud who's doing everything just to "look better".

Not necessarily - it could instead be that he sincerely believes that these details carry forward into the music. But they don't.

It's actually easy to create musical patterns that aren't aurally intelligible. For example the retrograde inversion & transposition of a tone row. Serialists told us our musical culture just "wasn't ready" or or ears "weren't mature enough" to get the connection between a row and its RI. We are 90 years on and I bet 99% of people still are incapable of this kind of pattern matching. Because it has nothing to do with musical culture and everything to do with our mental architecture. The ear and mind being finite, it's easier to create sounds and patterns they can't parse than sounds they can. Thats why there are ground rules...

Music, like the Sabbath, was "made for man" not the other way around. Music is FOR people like cities and language and bread are FOR people. Music that ignores its grounding in human hearing is like an architect that constructs an apartment building without a door. I'm sure one day an avante-garde architect will do just that... imagine the press conference...

"How do I get in?"

-"That's your problem."

"This is stupid!"

-"No, it's genius - nobody's ever done it before."

"And nobody will ever use this building."

-"Even if that's true it's beside the point. By building it I've paved the way for critical insights into the definition of architecture."

"No. No you haven't. You've ignored THE PURPOSE of architecture."

I could write a piece, that was one chord, consisting of all the prime numbered sine tones from 200 to 2000 Hz. Is it art? Is it music? I don't even want to get into those debates. Is it fraud? I guess it can't be, if I claim I wrote it in good faith. Is it pretentious? YES! It's INCREDIBLY pretentious because it presumes that what looks organized on paper will feel organized in the ear.

When the unifying factor is inaudible or un-parsable, well, there might as well BE no unifying factor. And the mind slides off and starts thinking about what it will cook for dinner. In the case of this piece, the score is full of complex rhythms that add up to an aural impression of indeterminate rhythm.

of course people have always writting apparently "meaningless" things in scores.

When you say that notation x "means" something you are saying that everyone understands what I intended. Ultimately it's contextual: the instruction "bluesy" means something to an orchestra today but not Mozart's orchestra. And therefore something is "meaningless" the first time someone writes it because it has no consensus meaning.

What I really mean by "meaning something" is again, "is it heard." You're right that there is a gray area. If I say "swing freely," that's audible. If I say "grazioso, giocoso" maybe the audience gets an impression. If I say "play this orange" that is not very helpful. I may have synesthesia etc but it doesn't help the performer replicate the sound. If I say "play it kumquat" I'm just being stupid/unhelpful.

There are several instructions like that in this piece:

Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz

Which is a musical joke.

- Where did you get the idea that tuplets should be "heard as tuplets"? Do you mean with that, that the audience hears "ah, a quintuplet"?

Yes, sure. Only, the pattern parts of their brains do that, not their consciousnesses.

And without a context, five eighth notes are absolutely identical to an eighth-note quintuplet.

Which supports my point doesn't it? - that a tuplet only has meaning in the context of a meter (even if it's only a local, momentary meter).

But really, it's only the overhasty accusation of pretension that really annoys me so much about all of this. Maybe because I've been accused of it too. Possibly.

I don't level that accusation against this music, only that the score is not much like the music.

Music is actually lucky in that it has few of these types of people:

An Oak Tree - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Damien Hirst - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Young British Artists - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Conceptual art - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I guess Lamonte Young counts. Anywya these are the really terrible people. The only sin this particular composer committed was attending the Manhattan School of Music :P ;)

Being just back from a seminar and some other things, I have to say that reading Weca's hilariously bad posts

(and he's a reviewer? REALLY?), this forum probably needs a sort of quality-control if it's EVER going to escape the "loltastic" zone. Seriously guys, if some guy comes around and doesn't understand why you tie stems over silences, he needs an education, not posting rights.

That's all.

Being just back from a seminar and some other things, I have to say that reading Weca's hilariously bad posts

(and he's a reviewer? REALLY?), this forum probably needs a sort of quality-control if it's EVER going to escape the "loltastic" zone. Seriously guys, if some guy comes around and doesn't understand why you tie stems over silences, he needs an education, not posting rights.

That's all.

The irony of posting a typical "You suck but I'm not going to offer reasons why or a viewpoint of my own" post - and then complaining about How Terrible The Internet Is - totally lost on you, eh?

As if it was any secret that from the entire forum only four or five people are competent enough to have any sort of meaningful discussion with. Everyone else that seems to post, well, it's nice that people participate, but it's impossible for anything to grow if people that know what they're talking about are constantly having to teach rather than actually get any sort of exchange, that's why none of us really stays or why the forum isn't really a place for people like that. Nobody wants to teach for free like that and get NOTHING back, not even a meaningful exchange.

If you REALLY want my opinion then I shouldn't have to resort to teaching you. Actual discussions don't work like that. There's no ground knowledge here and no quality control, so anyone who knows jack scraggy walks in and asks whatever insane question and since this is the interwebs, defends it to the death even if it's completely retarded.

So why not rename the discussion forum to "teaching people who ask stupid questions" forum, eh? It's more like that and it has been kind of like that since I've known the forum, it just seems to get worse and worse.

Robin and Christopher and gardener offer the most insight and a good assessment.

Weca - I can understand your point but you blow it out of proportion. As a pianist there is only one spot I think the composer is being a little fussy rhythmically the eight note triplet where he has a sixteenth rest then a sixteenth with a breath mark then a quarter. But it is not so bad as to be confusing - I'd just make the sixteenth staccato or ask the composer how large a breathe there? But overall the piano part is not difficult. If you want to see a more challenging score for solo piano I suggest checking the Ruggles Evocations score. For the opposite - a score that seems not to bad (and almost traditional until you realize those 4 quarter notes are to be played against 5 before you switch to playing steady eighths in 2/4)but it is an extremely difficult piece to play try Stravinsky's Threni.

It's actually easy to create musical patterns that aren't aurally intelligible. For example the retrograde inversion & transposition of a tone row.

Yes, that may be not "aurally intelligible" for a majority of situations and a majority of people (while it certainly would be quite possible to construct examples where this easily is possible) - but the point here is that you are making an assumption that the aim of writing a retrograde inversion & transposition of tone row is to make it audible as -just that-. You can't say that a retrograde inversion isn't audible, it obviously will create a specific set of sounds - it is just not audible for many people as what you think it "should" be audible as. 12-tone rows aren't themes (even if some early experiments with them had some similarities to themes). And if you expect them to be used for the same purpose as a theme in classical music you're probably going to be disappointed. They are a method of tone generation with certain properties (such as specific interval constellations, etc.). The same applies to all the other points you are making: You first make an assumption of what a thing is "meant to be heard as" and when you then don't hear it that way, you dismiss the notation as meaningless - without ever considering that your assumption may not have been the only possibility…

I could write a piece, that was one chord, consisting of all the prime numbered sine tones from 200 to 2000 Hz. Is it art? Is it music? I don't even want to get into those debates. Is it fraud? I guess it can't be, if I claim I wrote it in good faith. Is it pretentious? YES! It's INCREDIBLY pretentious because it presumes that what looks organized on paper will feel organized in the ear.

Again, exactly the same thing. Sorry, but you are being somewhat pretentious here, implying that you understand any musical reason why one might have composed that chord and then dismissing it. A chord consisting of the frequencies of the primes between 200 and 2000 will sound in a well-defined way, with certain characteristics. But you actually aren't talking about things that are inaudible but things that aren't reckognizable as a very particular thing, namely the thing you think is the "important" one. I could think of a number of reasons why one might have written that chord - and be it only to create a quasi-random sequence of intervals, with a setup of frequency distances that "gets somewhat wider on the top". Sure, you could have used a random number generator with some filters as well - but what's -worse- about using prime numbers, if they have the same characteristics? Or well, what if a composer just by chance tried playing that chord and happened to like the sound, quite independantly of any meaning of "prime numbers"? And so on. But you're the one who's here presuming that it presumes a rather particular thing - which it probably doesn't.

Yes, there were times and composers that showed quite some "number-fetishism", which may, to some degree have been based more on a fascination with certain mathematical properties than sounds. Boulez himself admitted that during a certain time he did that and that he dislikes it now. But that doesn't mean you can throw every piece that "uses numbers", mathematical systems, physical models, etc. in the same pot and assume that there aren't any good musical reasons behind that decision.

And therefore something is "meaningless" the first time someone writes it because it has no consensus meaning.

You can't just wait until a "consensus meaning" pops out from nowhere. You either have to just write it down and leave it to the performers to build such a consensus meaning over time through their interpretations of your notation, or you explain it in detail in your performance notes, or you simply don't care about a consensus meaning at all and leave it to the performers to let themselves be inspired in various differing ways by it. If people never used terms/signs that had no consensus on what they meant, we probably wouldn't have any music notation at all.

What I really mean by "meaning something" is again, "is it heard." You're right that there is a gray area. If I say "swing freely," that's audible. If I say "grazioso, giocoso" maybe the audience gets an impression. If I say "play this orange" that is not very helpful. I may have synesthesia etc but it doesn't help the performer replicate the sound. If I say "play it kumquat" I'm just being stupid/unhelpful.

I don't get what you're saying there. "Giocoso" is definitely not an acoustical property. A sound is never inherently "playful" or whatever, since a sound is a sound and an emotion is an emotion. After many years there have been built many clich

I don't have the time to read the whole thread, so sorry about that and it may have been mentioned before, but it's quite simple: For anyone wondering if the score given in the link in the first post, is too complicated all they have to do is to try and notate it in a different way and actyally get the same result from the performers. If so, then it's possible that the score is too complicated for little reason. If not, then it means that the score should be exactly as it currently stands!

I think that the score is fine (Secret Machines No. 5). Not that absolutely everything is as uncomplicated as I'd like it to be, nor that I'm able to understand everything in 2 minutes of browsing inside Firefox, but it simply looks fine and by looking I could 'guess' (which seems to be the right word, given the time spent on the score) what the composer meant in that particular place.

SSC: I think that you could tone down your personal comments against other people "only 4-5 members are competent enough...". I hardly see any reason for polemics in this thread.

Wecca: Respect amongst your peers will get you further than continuous judgment...

And, btw, there are plenty of reasons why one would avoid barlines, or time signatures (heck I've done it a few times as well). There's plenty of reason to avoid a very precise notation but rather put some things which are more... liberal (like smaller notes, or beams getting larger, etc). Allowing the freedom to make a choice to the performers is something which is growing stronger for quite a few decades now.

Also, the serialisms comment. Yes, some people are still not ready for serialism and probably will never be, samewise that some people are still not ready for... Beethoven! But the idea is not always to get what's going on on an aural level alone. Just because you can't distiguish (you, me, anybody), the retrograde it doesn't mean that the piece is not 'better' like this. It's been guided because of that and thus the whole pieces changes, because of the usage of the retrograde in one place. Not to mention that there could be things that one does not get but only in a subconscious level.

BUT, you are right, that contemporary music is turning (for a long time now) a 'hobby' for the very few that have the time to devote to it. It's no longer accessible to the crowds. :(

it's nice that people participate, but it's impossible for anything to grow if people that know what they're talking about are constantly having to teach...

Nobody wants to teach for free...

I shouldn't have to resort to teaching you....

Is that your attitude? I feel for your students. They deserve a USO care package and a commendation from the President for service in harm's way.

YC doesn't stand for "your classroom." So whatever attitude you have in that space, even if it were appropriate there, isn't at all here.

I didn't ask to learn at your feet, I asked you to justify and explain your point of view (specifically on beaming over rests) the same way Gardener and I have been trying to do with each other. Saying that anyone who disagrees with you "knows jack scraggy" or is "insane, completely retarded" is not much of a contribution.

"I could point out why I'm right, but why bother, internet refuse like you would be too stupid to understand it" (the gist of both your posts in this thread) - well, that is an argument only found in the mouths of those who can't explain why they think what they think. Or those who believe everything they think is self evident (which is much the same thing). In any case talking with that kind of person is rarely constructive.

If you start posting constructive things in this thread I'll be happy to read them.

Gardener, another interesting post, I will reply to it later tonight when I have time. I think we have aired out most of the issues and at least can see where we each stand :) I do want to address Mahler and "giocoso" though.