The Fredösphere

Kyle Gann tells the story of writing music in his MIDI editor and using a Disklavier (essentially, a MIDI-driven player piano) to perform it live.  He always gets a few reactions that indicate some people find the whole thing illegitimate.  He tells it all thoroughly, but my summary is:  with MIDI, some doors close, yes, but others open.  It is its own thing, a new thing.  MIDI music can coexist with live human performance, for as long as human performers find it difficult when Gann decides to write

...lightning-fast quintuple octaves, or a whole string of six parallel sixths, I go right ahead. And the whole point is to be freed from downbeats and meters, so the first thing I’ll do is lay out a whole set of nested tempo relationships, like 7-against-9-against-11-against-13-against-17, and then fill in the notes, knowing that notes in one line will coincide with notes in another line only at downbeats, and then I try to avoid putting notes on downbeats. By doing that I get exactly what I want, which I feel is a wonderful spontaneity of notes bubbling up, not randomly, but like corks bobbing up and down on brisk waves, with patterns that are repetitive but wholly unsynchronized.

Meanwhile, Forrest Covington is looking at Kandinsky paintings and getting ideas.  He says the painter's goal was to express musical structure visually.  Covington wants to reverse the process:

Suppose you start at one edge of the painting, like the upper left hand corner, and perform a sweep motion across the canvas, using an imaginary slot or stripe, like a scanner does. Then you can create a time line of sorts, for the events happening in the painting, as different objects and colors enter into and then recede from your viewing stripe. Translate these motions to a score.

My own experiments in charting and graphing seems pretty tame compared to these guys.  After my family acquired my grandmother's player piano (during my teen years) I took a roll of wax paper and cut holes in it and mounted it on the player.  My cutting was not random; I kept in mind how I wanted the masses of sound to move around, but I didn't worry too much about choosing precise notes.  I do recall attempting one huge chord that spelled out the overtone series, but measuring and cutting the tiny holes was a hug pain in the neck and I dropped that approach.  Mostly I relied on diagonal slits which gave lightning-fast runs up and down the keyboard. 

As Gann points out, watching a scrolling graph as the music plays is very satisfying; the eye sees what will happen just before the ear hears it, and this puts you right into the music.  It's that anticipation that really helps the listener and which is otherwise only present with familiar music.

This inability of the audience to anticipate when listening to new music is one of the very biggest hurdles that contemporary composers face.  Maybe graphics like scrolling charts during performances should not be regarded as gimmicks.  Hmmm.  Must.  Think.  Harder.  About.  This.