Of course, what I want to know is whether anyone has ever tried to get a group together to perform it as an instrumental score.

-Morton Feldman

“John’s music … had nothing to do with improvisation. That was one of the major confusions that people made, and that, clearly, was dead wrong. We’re getting now to the period of the Variations sequence, which really pushed the notion of what constituted a piece of music, because nothing was said about anything except you had to make yourself something out of these lines and dots and things that were on plastic sheets. … But what always struck me as so mysterious was that what people did with those things almost all the time would come out sounding like John’s work. … There’s this mysterious thing that in those days people would try some of John’s chance techniques, but their music wouldn’t come out sounding like John’s.”

The first version I ever heard was from Berio’s Folk Songs song cycle.  I found this nice video on youtube, which scrolls through the score as the piece goes along:

Not my favorite performance (I’m attached to this recording, with Christine Schadeberg), but good.

There are all these other great performances, though.  Nina Simone’s is just haunting.  There are several videos online of different performances of hers.  I quite like this one, for her piano playing as much as her singing.  I love the beginning in particular, while she effortlessly keeps playing while a “roadie” adjusts the piano bench underneath her. The second part of the video, with Emile Latimer singing and playing guitar (starting around 3:25), I love less.

Joan Baez does a nice version, probably closest to the folk ideal of the ones I’ve heard:

Then there’s the famous recording by the enigmatic, influential jazz singer Patty Waters, with a totally improvised accompaniment by Burton Greene. Completely brilliant and otherworldly:

The Uninhabited score, on the other hand, has no “legend”, and only broad strokes in terms of instructions on how to read it.  The score comprises three pages, each with 12 drawings.  Each drawing is a sketch inspired by the parts of buildings people don’t live or work in (basements, boiler rooms, crawl spaces, etc), often in extreme close up, or from an unusual angle.  In several of the drawings, the depicted object is very clear (a faucet, a bare lightbulb, a beam, a valve, etc), but for the most part they are either so zoomed in or so spare that they become abstract lines and patterns of shading.  Here are the three pages (forgive the crappy iPhone pictures).  Click to embiggen:

The instructions to the performer are as follows:

Uninhabited can be played by between four and eight performers, on any instruments, with or without the 6-channel sound installation Moving Parts.  In most cases, the performers should be spread out from one another such that each occupies his or her own space in the performance area.  When playing with Moving Parts, amplification may be used where necessary to ensure balance. Performers should agree at the outset on a total duration (usually not less than 30 minutes).

The score comprises 3 pages, each containing twelve sketches.  Each sketch corresponds to one continuous stretch of improvisation, lasting anywhere from around 20 seconds to around 3 minutes, or longer. They may be played in any order, and each may be repeated any number of times. No performance need include every sketch. Following each, there should be a period of silence, as little as several seconds or as much as several minutes.

For each new improvisation, players will initiate one of the following: 1) a sustained tone, chord, or noise; 2) a repeating melodic figure, ostinato, or noise pattern; or, 3) a continuous texture which, though not a sustained or repeating sound, maintains an consistent character (eg, an improvisation using a single technique, or drawing from a finite set of gestures).  The character of the chosen sound may be informed by the sketch, or by the player’s momentary interest.  Generally speaking, players should avoid extremely loud playing, except for very short intervals.

Once a sustained, repeating, or continuous sound has been initiated, players should, in their mind’s eye, chart a course through the chosen sketch, moving in different directions, using its contours and shadings to color and shape their playing.  For example, one may choose to map darkness of shading to the loudness of a sound, or to the noisiness, tempo, articulation, spectral richness, etc., thereof (or any combination of these – a “macro”, if you will).  Sustained, continuous, and repeating sounds thus acquire motion.  This “movement” through the sketch is free but must be intentional, making an effort to really explore it musically. Players are encouraged to give preference to the exploration and development of their own ideas over ensemble considerations.  Each performer should aim above all to maintain his or her independence.

The piece was performed three times – 10/14, 10/21, and 11/5 – each time with my generative sound installation, Moving Parts (itself based largely on recordings of building noise).  The instrumentation varied from one show to the next.  The first performance had bass clarinet, cello, electric guitar, and drum set; the second had flute/alto flute, alto saxophone, trombone, cello, and electric guitar; and the third had tenor sax, violin, electric piano/toy piano, and drum set (a total of ten players lent their talents to this project, to whom I’m very grateful).

A bit about some of the philosophical underpinnings of the piece: two recent interests of mine are the juxtaposition of independent systems, and the transposition of generative composition from computer music to live, acoustic music (score as algorithm, player as processor).  In the case of Uninhabited, each player is an independent system – imagine several computers running the same program simultaneously with different starting variables (experience, taste, etc.), and different types of output (different instruments).  This is the basic model for the piece.

The analogy breaks down, though, because of the complexities of human experience and the limitations of human information processing (particularly the speed thereof). It wouldn’t make any sense to write a generative piece for humans which was truly faithful to the computer model.  The “processor” is unpredictable and impressionable, so the “algorithm” – the score – almost has to be interpretive and poetic rather than rule-oriented, except for certain basic rules.  There’s still an input-processor-output model, but each step of the process is relational rather than mathematical.

I was struck when listening to the three performances of Uninhabited by how “right” it sounded, despite how little the score prescribed.  The sounds were right, the textures were right, the proportions of textures were right – the piece sounded how I intended it to sound.  I asked several of the performers to reflect on their experience playing the piece, and on the score in particular, and got quite a range of responses.  Some wanted more information to work with, others described it (somewhat to my surprise) as “straight-forward”.  One criticism I received a few times had to do with my instruction to “give preference to the exploration and development of their own ideas over ensemble considerations.”  This was meant more as a nudge, something to keep in mind while playing, rather than as an absolute command, but I completely understand the difficulty of constantly trying to fight an instinct to react to other sounds in the room.  Perhaps in a future installation, I’d try to aim for greater isolation of the performers, say by miking their instruments, and sending the feeds directly to headphones, so that they can only hear themselves, or perhaps literally isolating them, putting them in different parts of the building, and piping their playing to a common area, where the sounds can mix.

One thing I was gratified by was that most players found the drawings interesting to improvise to.  Some found those that clearly represented objects more interesting to work with, while others found the more abstract textures more fruitful, but universally the players reported finding something interesting to work with in the score.  With 36 images, each improvisation lasting an average of around two minutes, substantial periods of rest, and the stipulation that drawings may be ignored or returned to several times, I think it’s okay that not every player be interested in every drawing – the idea is that they use the ones they are drawn to.

Here are a couple excerpts:

excerpt 1 (from performance #3, with Argeo Ascani, Mike McCurdy, Joshua Modney, Kathy Supove)

excerpt 2 (from performance #2, with Jen Baker, Jessie Marino, James Moore, Jessica Schmitz, and Alvin Scott)

I end up rather conspicuous, hunched over large manuscript paper with my automatic pencil and straightedge. I suppose it’s natural that some would be curious and come over and ask me what I’m doing. The first question is usually, “Are you writing music?”.  I’m always tempted to say something snarky like, “No, I’m scrambling eggs,” but I never do. I just say yes, which is in almost every case enough to elicit awe-struck bulging eyes or a “wow….”. It reminds me just how few people there are that actually do this (not composing – but specifically writing notes on staves).   I think, if the guy at the table next to me were sketching designs for a building, I’d feel the same way. It wouldn’t matter whether it were any good. I’d just be amazed to see someone with those faculties at work, because they’re so mysterious to me.

The usual follow-up is, “What kind of music do you write?”. This is a tricky on for me. How do I explain what I do to the (probably) uninitiated? “Classical,” to most people, means Mozart. “Electronic” means Ace of Base. “Experimental” means nothing, except perhaps the vulgar stereotype of the performance artist wearing scuba gear and angel wings and peeing on the American flag while reciting Shakespeare sonnets in binary code. Give me a minute or two, and I can explain it pretty well, but I feel that that’s giving them more than they bargained for. I usually end up just telling them in very broad strokes about the piece I’m currently working on, often no more than the instrumentation. Again, this tiny piece of information is met with wows and impressed expressions. (I wish it was this easy to impress audiences and my peers).

In any case, today, it was an elderly woman who asked me the above questions. I explained that I was working on a piece for 3 drumsets and electonic sounds, to b played in the Make Music NY festival next month.   Her response: “It’s not that metal, is it?”. I assured her it wasn’t metal, and she said, “Good. That stuff’s just too much. No one wants to hear that.” I smiled. She asked when the concert is, and then said she’d try to come. I really hope she does, although if so, I may feel compelled to lower the threshold on my limiter.  No one wants shouts of “Keep it down!” during a premiere.

I’m very grateful to know, though, about Anestis Logothetis, who’s score is the canvas for the piece below.  Beautiful score.  I want to get my hands on a copy.

The following image is a page from my newest piece, Study no. 1, for amplified acoustic guitar.

This is my first real foray into the world of graphic scores.  I have long been making unconventional scores, but they’ve always been essentially staff-based.  The Study uses a kind of staff, but the horizontal lines are not staff lines, but rather the strings of the guitar.  On the left are the tuning pegs, on the right the sound hole and bridge.  Time is not represented in the score – events are instead defined by space.

I didn’t jump right into this notation.  I tried more traditional ways of expressing the sounds I was making and the ways I was making them, using the horizontal dimension to represent time, and filling it with symbols to represent the different sounds, but I found that ultimately not to be really expressive of the piece.  When I hit upon this, it seemed actually to represent the sound much better, and sacrificing control over the order of events seemed a very small price to pay (that would be the micro-order – the above is page 5 of 6, and the pages do have to be played in order).

Also, it’s fun to play with colored pencils.