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Friday, April 15, 2016

Pre-form topology

There is a nice text of Cornellius Cardew about notation and interpretation where he says that what makes a score different of a drawing is the relation that is established there between the space (the paper) and the time (the form). That's why in the score there is a condition of readability, rules that set at least the relationship between the page and the form so that the score is no longer a drawing1.

A posible orientation of notation is to establish with it the musical form. In the same text Cardew notes the following common idea: the composers works with sounds. But the things that are written in paper are not sounds. Earle Brown would say that too2. There is a whole scheme of steps (a "production chain") that gives place to form. Anyway, in certain practice it is intended to determine form with notation.

Indetermination is other way. The same idea of something indeterminate in the score says something about the relationship between notation and sounds. If the score must be submitted to a process to get to sound, a process where information passes from one state to another (paper, player, action, sound), ¿what is the limit of the determinable? If the score is only part of the work, ¿how can it pretend to determinate it all?

So: form in music is what you hear, just as you see the shape of an object. Everything that sounds in the piece is form and the perception of this form gives us something like the identity of the piece (another concept shared between Cardew and Brown). The question now is ¿what is written?. Not only a series of steps or possibilites for interpretation. There is a pre-form, something that is there before time is put into play.

To understand this I use the concept of topological figure. A topological figure doesn't stop beeing it when you apply continuous transformation to it (for example, if you strech it, shrink it or twist it). A square or a rectangle are topologicaly equivalent, even through they're visibly different from each other. A topological figure becomes another when you aply to it a cut or when two or more points of the figure are joined. A square is topologicaly different form a cylinder (a square with two parallel sides joined).

The pre-form I mentioned earlier has topological characteristics. In this state, the piece has potentialy infinite forms, one for each possible interpretation. Doesn't matter how specifficaly written it is. There is an interview to Antoine Beuger where he mentions Leibniz to say that in nature (let's say, in facts) no two leaves are alike3. Same can be said about interpretations. The score is not the form because it has no place in the facts, no place in time. Only through interpretation a from can be extracted from it, by means of processes in which always something is lost and something (or everything, at last) is added. Two forms can come out from the same score and this is a central fact of indetermination.

1 Cardew, C. Notation-interpretation. Tempo, Nueva Serie, No. 58 (verano de 1961), pp. 21-33
Brown, E. The notation and performance of new music. The Musical Quarterly Vol. 72, No. 2 (1986), pp. 180-201
Saunders, J. Antoine Beuger. The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. pp. 231–241. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Extraído de http://www.james-saunders.com/interview-with-antoine-beuger/

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