# Graphic Notation



## Mr. Big Noodles (Jul 25, 2013)

Does anybody know some good resources concerning graphic notation? I'm looking for something that discusses practical considerations specifically, but anything that instructs or analyzes would be great. I'm writing a piano piece that has a couple of movements that are performed on the inside of the instrument, so I don't think a grand staff is gonna cut it.


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## Given To Fly (Jul 25, 2013)

I can't name a journal article or dissertation but I'm sure there is a lot of information stemming from George Crumb's _Makrokosmos_.


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## AugmentedFourth (Jul 26, 2013)

Is this the kind of thing people use graphic notation for? Because I never really understood why it's called graphic "notation", since I kind of figured it went something like:

1) Draw squiggly lines
2) Name your piece
3) Give to a performer of musical instruments
4) ???
5) Profit! (Probably not really.)

i.e., more of a freer form of expressing music non-musically rather than using a rigidly defined "notation" to express music non-musically.


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## Hollowway (Jul 26, 2013)

Man, this thread is making me confused. SW asking a question of us, rather than the other way around! It's like God waking me up and saying, "Hey Andy, what would you do in this situation...?" 

But seriously, I don't know of a particular book, but years ago in college I took a contemporary composition class and we couldn't use any standard notation for a number of the pieces we did. The teacher showed us some examples, but he told us that most people just developed stuff on their own, in terms of the notation. So my advice would be to just search online for ideas and assemble those into your battery of knowledge. I figure you have so much that you know about music as it is, once you get familiar with these things you'll be an excellent judge of what makes sense and what doesn't.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Jul 26, 2013)

Given To Fly said:


> I can't name a journal article or dissertation but I'm sure there is a lot of information stemming from George Crumb's _Makrokosmos_.



Unfortunately, Crumb did not dabble in the sort of indeterminate notation I'm looking for. The Makrokosmos score looks cool, but one could notate this stuff linearly and normally if they so pleased.







What I'm trying to do is to exploit the timbres that result from direct manipulation of the strings: one movement is percussive colors, the other movement is sustained colors. Henry Cowell deals with the inside of the piano in The Banshee, which actually uses some pretty normal notation, but the technical requirements for the piece are different from what I intend.











What I'm looking for is on the order of Stockhausen's notation for the fixed media in Kontakte:






However, that's far too much information, and is really meant for someone to follow along rather than translate into sound. (By the way, I read the score for this piece, in its entirety, upside down, the first time I heard it. Bro points.)

Following is a preliminary sketch of the first page that I put together a few months back, before life started happening. The three staves indicate relative registers (high, medium, low), since not all pianos have the same construction. Pitch is indeterminate for practical reasons, since my performer is not going to have a whole lot of time to put this together and the other movements are hard. Also, because I like the idea of aleatory mixed within determinate structures, and because timbre has precedence over pitch in these movements.






I feel like I'm just wanking about though, as if I'm going about it the wrong way. I have a definite idea in mind, so I'm trying to avoid making some amateur notation mistake. Unfortunately, there probably isn't any standard method to writing or interpreting this kind of thing, but if there is an established way of doing X, I'd rather find out before I do Y instead.



Hollowway said:


> But seriously, I don't know of a particular book, but years ago in college I took a contemporary composition class and we couldn't use any standard notation for a number of the pieces we did. The teacher showed us some examples, but he told us that most people just developed stuff on their own, in terms of the notation. So my advice would be to just search online for ideas and assemble those into your battery of knowledge. I figure you have so much that you know about music as it is, once you get familiar with these things you'll be an excellent judge of what makes sense and what doesn't.



Yeah, that's about as much as I've been thinking. Any articles that I've found are too simplistic, and I don't know of any pieces that do what I want to do. I might just have to, you know, put the time in and figure it out on my own. 

There are some common ideas in terms of representing textures, but these are things I am already aware of and using: Graphic Notation

An article that is set against an aesthetic and philosophical argument, which I really don't need: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/scoring-outside-the-lines/?_r=0

Horat&#807;iu Ra&#774;dulescu wrote a lot of music for string instruments in which the relative position of the hand on the string is sort of indicated, and he works with intervallic distances rather than pitch distances from time to time. Sort of in the vein of what I am going for, except a violin has 4 strings, and a piano has 22 times that (not counting multiple courses). This is easily my favorite score page in the entire history of music ever:


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## farren (Jul 26, 2013)

What the hell.


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