BY MICHAEL MATHIESON-SANDARS
It’s true enough to say that a musical score communicates to a performer what to play and how to play it.
Of course, there’s more to it than this.
No matter how specific notation is, it must still be interpreted by a performer who – along with their individual understanding of the score – incorporates any number of relevant conventions and traditions.
While there’s a lot of nuance to this process, it’s fair to say that the notated work is mediated by our social understanding of music and music history. This mediation between the performer and a score can alter the intent and character of a performance, change the way performers relate to one another, and what comes across to the audience.
Composers don’t have clean hands either, and it’s something that’s become increasingly interesting to me. Perhaps because of this, it’s the main theme for {de}notations – an upcoming concert by violinist Alethea Coombe and pianist Jack Barnes, as well as a new duo I’ve written for them to be performed within it.
While I’ll tell you a little about my piece shortly, the concert contains two works that really strike me as interesting counterpoints to each other.
The first is Rebecca Saunders’ stunning Duo, composed for violin and piano, which includes a full two pages of performance notes explaining the different unconventional techniques used in the piece and the ways in which they are notated. There are extended sections where the piece, in painstaking detail, asks the violinist to explore the colours possible around a single repeated pitch. Playing across the different strings and a wide dynamic range – with changing bowing patterns and positions, and coloured with microtonal inflections and glissandi – the result is something of a straight line, which coruscates with fragile energy.
But to get there is a lot of work: everything detailed specifically, note to note, and it is up to the player to grapple with the instructions and, through practice, make the composer’s exploration their own.
There’s a relationship where, through the detail in the score, the performer is pushed to explore the extremities of colour available to them. It also creates a certain relationship with the other performer. In a duo context, where such a difficult violin part needs to align with the piano, the performers are encouraged to be hyper-aware of one another. Rehearsals establish where they’re together, mark cues for where they’re not, and build strategies to continue when virtuosity requires that performance be on the edge.
Pauline Oliveros, meanwhile, establishes a very different relationship between the performers and the score. The score for Magnetic Trails is a diagram, resembling a multi-directional flow chart which, along with some text directions, helps performers choose what directions the piece could take. While the text provides some allusions to the density of materials in each of its four movements, the actual sounds themselves as well as the order and duration of the movements are left entirely to the performers.
By the structure of the diagram, and reiterated twice in the text, a performer can almost always choose to stop playing and listen throughout the course of the piece. It creates a space for the performers to interpret freely, listen to one another and the space they’re in, and respond to these stimuli alongside the score. The results are impossible to predict as a listener, but the impetus of the performance will almost certainly be different to the Saunders.
The new work I’ve written, then, tries to have it both ways.
There are sections of detailed notated material, sections of directed improvisation, and sections which are left entirely to the performers – all of which flow back and forth multiple times across the piece. The notated sections set the scene for improvisation – they establish a mood, a character, a direction, and a pool of specific techniques and gestures which the player can choose to draw upon when improvising. When listening, it’s not always clear precisely where one section ends and another begins. But something changes. Something emerges: a freedom; a razor-focus; time dissipates or sharpens.
See Jack Barnes and Alethea Coombe perform {de}notations at 2pm August 26 at the Moonah Arts Centre.
Images supplied.
