![]() ![]() If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture, if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing – you’re talking about 28,000 variables.” So on those very rare occasions I’ve thought, ‘God, if only I could write this down.’ But in fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and you can’t notate that anyway … That’s because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. There have been one or two occasions where I was stuck somewhere without my tape recorder and had an idea, tried to memorize it, and since a good idea nearly always relies on some unfamiliar nuance it is therefore automatically hard to remember. When asked by an interview why he never learned to read music, Eno, who preferred to composes directly onto tape, replied : Eno was inspired by composers like Cage and Reich, but had no formal music training. In so doing, he created not just an album, but an entire genre of music. Eno coined the term “ambient” to describe this atmospheric soundscape and distinguish it from the canned “elevator music” pioneered by Muzak. In 1978 musician Brian Eno created the seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Published on the back of the album sleeve The piece is ended sometime after all mikes have come to rest and are feeding back a continuous tone by performers pulling out the power cords of the amplifiers.”īrian Eno’s graphic notation for Music for Airports Performers then sit down to watch and listen to the process along with the audience. Thus, a series of feedback pulses are headed which will either be all in unison or not depending on the gradually changing phase relations of the different mike pendulums. Performers then carefully turn up each amplifier just to the point where feedback occurs when a mike swings directly over or next to it’s speaker. The performance begins with performers taking each mike, pulling it back like a swing, and then in unison releasing all of them together. Each microphone hangs a few inches directly above or next to it’s speaker. Each microphone’s cable is plugged into an amplifier which is connected to a speaker. “2, 3, 4 or more microphones are suspended from the ceiling by their cables so that they all hang the same distance from the floor and are all free to swing with a pendular motion. Parts of the handwritten score are a little difficult to read so here’s a transcription: The above recording was made by Sonic Youth for their 1999 album SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century. Steve Reich’s score for “Pendulum Music” is a straightforward, written set of instructions describing how the piece is staged and performed. According to the All Music Guide to Classical Music, Cage described the score as “a camera from which anyone can take a photograph.” Cage would continue to develop and expand this method throughout the 1950s and ’60s, as seen in the top image depicting the somewhat more elaborate score for “Fontana Mix.” Cage’s notation consists of four multi-channel cassette tapes, ten transparencies inscribed with tiny dots, one transparency bearing a straight line and ten sheets of paper on which colored squiggly lines were drawn, and a graph paper-like “staff.” The transparencies were used to derive coordinates that were then used to determine which tape was used, as well as the values of the sound from teh tape: length (in inches), volume, timbre, and so on. The composition was derived by placing the squares on top of one another in any combination. He first used this method in the 1958 score for “Variations I,” which consisted of six transparent squares – one with 27 points representing sound and five with five lines, representing any assigned musical value. To communicate his indeterminate “compositions,” to use the term loosely, Cage developed elaborate methods of graphic notation involving a series of transparencies. However, beginning in the years after World War II, some more progressive musicians and composers began to think that the music staff might be more restricting than liberating and began to experiment with new, more expressive forms of graphic music notation.Īmerican composer John Cage explored the use chance and indeterminacy in his musical compositions with the aim of erasing his own subjectivity from his music, the hand of the artists, as it were. ![]() A standardized, underlying structure meant that everything from Gregorian chant to “Johnny B Goode” could be preserved and proliferated with relative ease. With the development of music notation, music was set free from the delicate bonds of oral and aural traditions. ![]() The score for John Cage’s indeterminate composition “Fontana Mix” (image: BBC Radio 3) ![]()
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