Collaborative Practice and Notation

In a thesis entitled ‘Composition: Interaction and Collaboration’, the composer Tim Steiner reflects on notational difficulties and refers to composers for whom current notational schemes do not work well. He argues that difficulties with communication through notation ‘may be considered the most significant crisis in the history of western art music’ (Steiner, 1992: 34). Composer and performer Garth Knox expressed similar sentiments, indicating that notation is perhaps the biggest area of difference between composer and performer and the one that creates the biggest difficulties (Roe-Knox, 2004: Interview). One of the major advantages of composers and performers working collaboratively is that difficulties with notation can be circumscribed. This is particularly relevant in contemporary music, where the music often explores areas that are particularly unsuited to traditional notational schemes. These areas include timbre, gesture, articulation and feel (energy). The effective transmission of subtle musical gestures, nuance and inflection requires mutual consideration by both composer and performer. Working collaboratively ‘allows me to check if there’s clarity in my ideas’, Bennett noted, and he acknowledged that collaborative working helps him to clarify and refine his notational schemes and adapt them as necessary (Roe-Bennett, 2005: Meeting 2).

The following extract from one of the collaborative sessions with O’Leary indicates how discussions about the notation scheme for her new piece led to mutually agreed results:

JoL: I don’t know what it is? [Referring to the score whilst singing, laughing] PR: I’m not sure myself…but you have [written] this note, C sharp

PR: [Demonstrates this] which would be the right fingering…for that [points to score] JoL: Oh right, ok, I understand

PR: [continues playing] So they’re all of a kind.

JoL: Do they all do something like a sixth above? Roughly?

[Track 24]

Roe-O’Leary, 2004: Meeting 2

Later in the interview, O’Leary indicated that it would not have been possible to write all of the different colouristic gestures in the pieces using a computer programme and

so she decided on a hand-written score. Both Bennett and Gardner also produced hand-written scores in an effort to indicate more clearly the wide range of gestures and timbre in their pieces.

Designing ‘bespoke’ notation can create potential difficulties for dissemination, as other performers would not be privy to the minutiae of the original discussions that took place in relation to the notation adopted. As Merrick has suggested in her article on collaboration and the contemporary clarinet concerto, the potential for a work to become ‘customised to accommodate the skills and predilections of a particular player, [could] possibly [be] to the detriment of other exponents’. She also speculates that this could equally detract a composer from her or his normal compositional style, possibly leading to a less cohesive and convincing outcome. In the end Merrick cautions that ‘it may be incumbent on a performer to temper, or adapt, her aspirations…in order to encourage composers to adopt a more realistic and perhaps pragmatic approach’ (Merrick, 2003: 12).

6.3 IMPROVISATION

The ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl once observed that ‘if the concept of improvisation can be said to be at all viable, it should be considered one of the few universals of music in which all cultures share in one way or another’ (Nettl, 1974: 4). The concept of improvisation as a universal in music would seem on the face of it to be contradicted by certain attitudes in western classical music.

The domination of the notated score, and the reverence with which musicians in classical music treat it, continues to be the tradition’s major defining characteristic, with improvisation often considered at best controversial. Yet if we consider improvisation in a broader context, where musical expression is seen as fundamentally an improvisatory impulse, we can again begin to place improvisation at the centre of classical music also. Benson argues that in fact the acts of composing, performing and listening are inherently improvisatory. He postulates that music is

implicitly improvisatory and that ‘the processes by which a work comes into existence is best described as improvisatory at its very core, not merely [in] the act of composing but also [in] the acts of performing and listening’ (Benson, 2003: 2). On the other hand, for many iconic figures in classical music, including Boulez and Stockhausen, Wolterstorff’s (1980: 64) claim that ‘to improvise is not to compose’ rings true. However, if we accept that composers never create ‘ex nihilo’, as Benson argues, but instead improvise (sometimes on tunes that already exist but more often within the tradition in which they work), we get a broader sense of the improvisatory origins of all composition.

The same applies to performance. Even when strictly notated, ‘the interpretation of the score will normally display improvisatory activity compressed into the microscopic domain of expressive adjustments’ (Cyprian-Love, 2005: 26). Music critic Paul Bekker, writing in 1922, offers an interesting perspective on improvisation and its role in music:

The art of musical performance is, in its origins and very being, an improvisatory art…This improvisation has as its goal to illuminate the musical work through the intimate, creative fusion of composer and performer, as if in the moment of its first sounding, thus bringing it into harmony with the composer’s original creative impulse…The problem of performing art in our day lies in moving from a pedantic concept of reproduction to an objectively founded and nonetheless personally unhampered improvisation. This may sound purely theoretical, and yet already much is won if we dare to declare and hold fast to the concept of improvisation as actually the highest and only true artistic experience.

Bekker, quoted in Hunter, 2004: 15.

The composer and improviser Frederic Rzewski is quoted, in Bailey’s seminal study of improvisation, on the difference between composing and improvising as follows:

In 1968 I ran into Steve Lacy (composer and improviser) on the street in Rome. I took out my pocket tape recorder and asked him to describe in 15 seconds the difference between composition and improvisation. He answered: ‘In 15 seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have 15 seconds’. His answer lasted exactly 15 seconds and is the best formulation of the question I know.

The subject of improvisation was considered an important area of discussion with all of the composers in this research. Some of them (Guilfoyle for example) considered improvisation a core principle of their musical life, with others, including O’Leary, feeling a little isolated from this most fundamental enterprise. This sense of exclusion seemed to be more conceptual than actual and in some ways reflects the legacy of training and ideology within classical music.