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42-504: In the draft constitution published in the Musical Times of June 1969, Cardew defines a scratch orchestra as: "a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification)". The Orchestra reflected Cardew's musical philosophy at that time. This meant that anyone could join, graphic scores were used (rather than traditional sheet music ), and there

84-605: A NZ Scratch Orchestra in 1970, which evolved into the group From Scratch in 1974. The first meeting of the Scratch Orchestra was at St Katharine Docks , 1 July 1969. It was announced by means of a "Draft Constitution", published in The Musical Times in June 1969. The Draft Constitution set out categories of musical activity: Improvisation Rites, Popular Classics, Compositions, and Research Projects. Cardew also proposed that

126-551: A clue to its solution, is a mensuration canon of 3:1, and has one voice take part at the interval of a fifth, that is, 3:2. Its relation to the Christian Holy Trinity is clear, suggesting the use of a triangular representation. The representation is unique, although possibly from a copy used by Dossi. With the significant shift of style of composers of the Humanist movement—the rediscovery and translation of Greek texts in

168-414: A compendium featuring graphic scores by composers from over fifty countries, demonstrating how widespread the practice has become. In addition to the more widespread popularity of graphic notation, new technology has expanded its possibilities. In his book The Digital Score: Musicianship, Creativity, and Innovation , Craig Vear describes how Artificial Intelligence and animation can be used to enhance

210-533: A method of notating music known as the Galin-Paris-Chevé system , building on a notation system created in the 18th century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau . This system used numbers to indicate scale degrees, and used dots either above or below the note to indicate if they were in the lowest octave or the highest. The middle octave, relative to the example, contained no dots. Flats and sharps were notated using backslashes and forward slashes respectively. Prolongations of

252-476: A note is either bass or treble", an indeterminacy which is not unusual in Cage's work, and which leaves decision-making up to the performer. Some graphic scores can be defined as action-based, where musical gestures are notated as shapes instead of conventional musical ideas. The use of graphic notation within a score can vary widely, from the score being made up entirely of graphic notation to graphic notation being

294-446: A puzzle canon might be notated as one line of music with two key signatures and clefs, where the worked-out result will be a two-voice canon with one voice the retrograde (reverse) of the other. In itself the score with the clues alone is not eye music. But represent the same work "graphically spelled out," however, say with a drawing of the clued score facing a mirror, and the score/drawing becomes eye music. The type of puzzle canon

336-529: A sense "infinite"—classically referred to as canon perpetuus, more commonly as "circular canons," and even more commonly as " rounds ." When an infinite (circular) canon is inscribed in a circle, and the circle itself is a clue that means "play me as a round," a different type of eye music entails. Another class of eye music is when the score is purposely made difficult for the performer. For example, in Benedetto Marcello 's cantata Stravaganze d’amore,

378-481: A small part of an otherwise largely-traditional score. Some composers include written explanations to aid the performer in interpreting the graphic notation, while other composers opt to leave the interpretation entirely up to the performer. Graphic notation is difficult to characterize with specificity, as the notation system is only limited by the imagination and ability of the composer. Though some composers, like John Cage, formulate graphic notation systems which unify

420-411: Is also a factor. A four-voiced circular canon, when notated as a puzzle canon, may remain an un-worked-out single line of notes, and be inadmissible as eye music. When that single line of notes is inscribed in a graphical shape it becomes eye music, even if the contrapuntal puzzle remains unsolved. An even finer use of graphical conceit is when the canon does not have any musical way to end, and are in

462-427: Is also apparent with border-line cryptographic contrapuntal works such as puzzle canons , which appear in the score entirely as a bare line of notes with clefs , rests , time signatures , or key signatures as clues to reveal multiple lines of music in canon. (Closer to true cryptographic works would be those with soggetto cavato , where letters are embedded in the work using their solfège names.) As an example,

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504-575: Is desired. One of the earliest pioneers of this technique was Earle Brown , who, along with John Cage , sought to liberate performers from the constraints of notation and make them active participants in the creation of the music. Graphic notation is characterized by its variability and lack of standardization. According to Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music, Vol. 1 , "Graphic notation is used to indicate extremely precise (or intentionally imprecise) pitch or to stimulate musical behavior or actions in performance." Modern graphic notation relies heavily on

546-427: Is in a heart shape, with red notes ( coloration ) indicating rhythmic alterations. Eye-music-within-eye music is in the small group of notes hanging like a locket in the upper left, also all in red and in the shape of a heart. Another work of Cordier, this time inscribed in circles, Tout par compas suy composés ("With a compass was I composed"), goes out of its way to identify itself as eye music. Josquin des Prez ,

588-432: Is unhearable by the listener. The Gulliver Suite by Telemann discussed below, shows a combination of three eye music features. The score is made difficult "unnecessarily," is eye-catching for its graphics, and has a clever external reference, all unnoticeable to the listener. Two examples of eye music from the early Renaissance are from Baude Cordier (ca. 1380-ca.1440). Cordier's chanson about love Belle, bonne, sage

630-400: The ars subtilior is Jacob Senleches ' La harpe de melodie , where the voices are notated on a stave that appears to be the strings of a harp. Eye music's popularity died down after the Humanist movement of the mid-16th century, later to be revitalized in the twentieth century as the use of graphic scores became prominent once again. The 19th century music educator Pierre Galin developed

672-483: The continuo part is written entirely in enharmonic chords, that is, "puns" of chord indications spelled with no regard to the key of the rest of the ensemble, but (in equal temperament ) indistinguishable audibly from those spelled in the appropriate way. Here, the perverse spelling (whether humorous or annoying to the trained continuo player) is not unusual graphically, but represents a score writing unmotivated except as an inside joke between composer and performer, and

714-481: The 1950s as an evolution of movement of Indeterminacy as pioneered by John Cage . The technique was originally used by avant-garde musicians and manifested itself as the use of symbols to convey information that could not be rendered with traditional notation such as extended techniques . Graphic scores have, since their conception, evolved into two broadly defined categories, one being the invention of new notation systems used to convey specific musical techniques and

756-771: The British Library has archive materials from Cardew. Graphic notation (music) Graphic notation (or graphic score ) is the representation of music through the use of visual symbols outside the realm of traditional music notation . Graphic notation became popular in the 1950s, and can be used either in combination with or instead of traditional music notation. Graphic notation was influenced by contemporary visual art trends in its conception, bringing stylistic components from modern art into music. Composers often rely on graphic notation in experimental music , where standard musical notation can be ineffective. Other uses include pieces where an aleatoric or undetermined effect

798-519: The Italian madrigalists from the 1580s until the early 17th century (whose style was almost literally imported to England), eye music reached its apogee until its transformation in the 20th century. Luca Marenzio is considered the composer most fond of eye music. For example, in the madrigal Senza il mia sole from his Madrigali a quattro, cinque e sei voci (1588), black notes are used for "chiuser le luci" ("close their eyes") Reaction by theorists of

840-401: The approach of specific pieces, or several pieces, there is no universal consensus on the parameters of graphic notation and its use. Though its most popular usage occurred in the mid-twentieth century, the first evidence of graphic notation dates back much earlier. Originally called " eye music ", these graphic scores bear much resemblance to the scores of composers like George Crumb . One of

882-513: The contemporaneous simplification to white note notation. This feature of eye music would extend through the Humanist period. Another instance of eye music in the Renaissance is apparently unique—the representation of a triangle for a canonic piece, which appears in juxtaposition with an anonymous canon written in a circle—in Dosso Dossi 's Allegory of Music. (It has been suggested that both

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924-504: The earliest surviving pieces of eye music is Belle, Bonne, Sage by Baude Cordier , a Renaissance composer. His score, formed in the shape of a heart, was intended to enhance the meaning of the chanson . Characteristic of the Ars subtilior , "experimentations with mensural signs and graphic shapes and colours were often a feature of musical design – for the sake of visual, rather than necessarily audible effect." Another example of eye music from

966-433: The function of the musician, and dared to add others to musical space in all its dimensions, with all their ontological consequences and burdens. They also changed the roles of the composer, the performer and the public, giving them totally new functions to explore. In this context, the score, which had to a great extent been considered a mere support for musical writing (with the exception of eye music ), began to flirt with

1008-619: The graphic score experience. He claims that these technologies are "the logical development of graphic score experiments from the latter part of the twentieth century. An interesting element of these is that they have to move in order for them to be read; without movement, they are unintelligible." Notable practitioners of graphic notation not mentioned previously include: Eye music Eye music (often referred to in English by its exact German translation Augenmusik ) describes graphical features of scores which when performed are unnoticeable by

1050-401: The imagination and inspiration of each individual performer to interpret the visual content provided by the composer. Because of this relative freedom, the realization of graphically notated pieces usually varies from performance to performance. For example, in notation indication "E" of his piece Concert for Piano and Orchestra , John Cage writes: "Play with hands indicated. Where clefs differ,

1092-418: The limits of the work and its identity. This marriage produced three paths: the first considered the musical score to be a representation of organized sound; the second conceived it as an extension of sound; and the third viewed it as another type of music, a visual music with its own autonomy, independent of sound. The score took on new meanings and went from being a mere support of sound to being an extension of

1134-451: The listener. By simple definition eye music is when the graphic notation of music is altered in some meaningful way visible to the performers. Often the changed "meaning" of the altered notation is enhanced by the music having compositional elements of melody and form such as word painting and canon . Moreover, the concept is demonstrated by sometimes differing perceptions of composer, performer, and listener. The difficulty in definition

1176-435: The mid-16th century—eye music flourished. The change in musical practice, particularly with the madrigalists and their focus on text declamation, at a word-by-word basis, was fertile ground for eye music. Words that suggest "blackness," such as "death" or "night," receive "black" notes (e.g. quarter notes , eighth notes ); "white words" such as "light" or "pale" receive "white" notes (e.g. whole notes , half notes ). With

1218-417: The most important composer of the next generation, used black note notation eye music in his well-known Nymphes des bois, a lament over the death of the composer Ockeghem , as well as another lament, this time for the composer Jacob Obrecht , Absolve, quaesumus, Domine. It can be seen that words of death and lament are associated with black notes, a mannerism made even simpler to achieve in light of

1260-540: The movement of abstract notation, John Cage and Allison Knowles published an archive of excerpts of scores by 269 composers with the intention of showing "the many directions in which notation is now going". Other notable pioneers of graphic notation include composers such as Roman Haubenstock-Ramati , Mauricio Kagel , György Ligeti ( Artikulation ), Krzysztof Penderecki , Karlheinz Stockhausen , and Iannis Xenakis , Morton Feldman , Constance Cochnower Virtue , and Christian Wolff . In 2008, Theresa Sauer edited

1302-558: The note values in the chaconne are " Lilliputian ", and, in the gigue , are "Brobdingnagian" ones. Because the Lilliputian movement is written in the bizarre time signature of 32 , and the Brobdingnagian one in the equally obtuse 1 (which is doubly humorous because gigues are generally light and brisk), the time signatures reduce to 4 and 8 , perfectly normal ones for each movement, as are

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1344-625: The note were notated using periods, and silence was notated with the number zero. This method was primarily used to teach sight-singing. The usage of symbols to indicate musical direction have been likened to an early version of graphic notation. Experimental music appeared in the United States and Europe during the 1950s, when many of the once untouchable parameters of traditional music began to be challenged. Aleatoric music , indeterminate music , musique concrète and electronic music shook previously unquestioned concepts, such as musical time or

1386-435: The other the use of conceptual notation such as shapes, drawings and other artistic techniques that are meant to evoke improvisation from the performer. Examples of the former include Morton Feldman 's Projection 1, which was the result of Feldman drawing abstract shapes on graph paper, and Stockhausen's Prozession . Examples of the latter include Earle Brown's December 1952 and Cornelius Cardew's Treatise , which

1428-515: The porousness of experimental music with respect to the plastic arts , notation came to be more and more influenced by a dialogue with painting, installations and performativity. As J.Y. Bosseur mentions in La musique du XXè siècle à la croisé des artes , the score progressed towards representing the management of space, a graphic space that allows us to know the multiple connections enclosed within it. Graphic notation in its modern form first appeared in

1470-489: The responsibility of programming of concerts be assigned in reverse seniority, so that the first concert, on 1 November 1969 at Hampstead Town Hall , was designed by Christopher Hobbs , an eighteen-year-old student of Cardew's at the Royal Academy of Music. Original members included Carole Finer . Despite the emphasis on free improvisation, the varying experience of the members, and the "do your own thing" free aesthetic of

1512-476: The technique of canon itself as well as its representation—the circle and the inherent symbolism of the tenets of Christianity in the triangle—also imply a "sense of the infinite.") The work represented in the triangle, is part of a "rough" version of a puzzle canon in Josquin's Agnus Dei II from his Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales canonic mass. It has the superscript "trinitas in un[um]" ("three in one") as

1554-453: The tempos associated with them and the type of dance of each. Post-tonal music has seen an expansion of eye music in line with its expansion and experimentalism of musical techniques. The last examples using a rigorous scoring system rooted in standard practice are the finely turned circles and spirals (as well as a peace symbol and a crucifix) in the works of George Crumb . The beauties of many examples of graphic notation are not, in fact,

1596-486: The time was mixed. A leading musical humanist, Vincenzo Galilei (the father of the physicist), was opposed to it but Zarlino approved. In the 20th century, Alfred Einstein , a groundbreaking scholar of the Humanist madrigal, wrote that eye music is "the most extreme and (for our aesthetic convictions) most horrible testimony of naturalism, of imitazione, in the madrigal." In Telemann 's Gulliver Suite for two violins

1638-465: The time, the Scratch Orchestra was a disciplined ensemble. Eventually the strains of Cardew's "reverse seniority", tensions between musically-trained and non-musically-trained members, and an increasing interest in political aesthetics led to a gradual change in the activities, and then the outlook of the ensemble. It was effectively inoperative by 1974. SCRATCH ORCHESTRA CONCERTS (Compiled by original member Michael Chant.) The British Sound Archive at

1680-404: The work, or even another work altogether, an element that was as important as the sounds and silences it contained, or more. These conceptions required a new language and a new reading of what it is to be musical. They also required a new notation, one that would reflect the changes taking place in the second artistic vanguards, and contain them, granting them a new semantics. In this way, taken with

1722-462: Was an emphasis on improvisation. The Scratch Orchestra arose from Cardew's "Experimental Music" class at Morley College , London, which served as a venue for extra rehearsals for Scratch Orchestra concerts, but Scratch Orchestra rehearsals were also held separately. New Zealand artist/musician Philip Dadson was amongst those at Morley College who were in the foundation group for the Scratch Orchestra and, after returning to New Zealand , established

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1764-485: Was written in response to Cage's 4'33" and which he wrote after having worked as Stockhausen's assistant. The score consists of 193 pages of lines and shapes on a white background. Here the lines represented elements in space and the score was merely a representation of that space at a given instant. In Europe, one of the most notable users was Sylvano Bussotti , whose scores have often been displayed as pieces of visual art by enthusiasts. In 1969, in an effort to promote

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