Element contents
Series: Elements in Music since 1945
A Semiotic Approach to Open Notations
Ambiguity as Opportunity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2021
Summary
Along with twentieth-century developments in playing techniques, technologies, and concepts of musical sound, the notations employed by composers have also changed. Composers of what Umberto Eco calls 'open works' often employ intentionally ambiguous music notations. These open notations ask the performer to play a radical and active role in co-creating the musical work. Scores that feature open notations have been part of the Western classical music landscape since the mid-twentieth century, and continue to have a vibrant community of practitioners today. In this Element, Tristan McKay considers intersections of ambiguity, authority, and identity in works with open notations. He develops a semiotic approach to open notation analysis and puts it into practice with in-depth analyses of openly notated works by Earle Brown, Will Redman, and Leah Asher.
- Type
- Element
- Information
- Series: Elements in Music since 1945Online ISBN: 9781108884389Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 29 April 2021
Bibliography
Asher, Leah, “Home Page.” Leah Asher official website. Accessed December 17, 2019. www.leahasher.com.Google Scholar
Brent, Joseph, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Brown, Earle, FOLIO (1952/53) and 4 Systems (1954) (New York: Associated Music, 1961).Google Scholar
Brown, Earle, “The Notation and Performance of New Music,” Musical Quarterly 72, no.2 (1986), 180–201.Google Scholar
Brown, Earle, “On December 1952,” [1970; transcription of audio] American Music 26, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 1–12.Google Scholar
Brown, Earle, “Prefatory Note,” in FOLIO (1952/53) and 4 Systems (1954) (New York: Associated Music, 1961).Google Scholar
Byrd, Donald, “Extremes of Conventional Music Notation,” Indiana University Bloomington. Revised mid-October 2018. Accessed December 17, 2019. http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/donbyrd/CMNExtremes.htmGoogle Scholar
Cady, Jason, “An Overview of Earle Brown’s Techniques and Media,” in Beyond Notation: The Music of Earle Brown, edited by Kim, Rebecca Y. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 1–20.Google Scholar
Cage, John, Notations, edited by Knowles, Alison and Cage, John (New York: Something Else Press, 1969).Google Scholar
Chumley, Lily, and Harkness, Nicholas, “Introduction: QUALIA,” Anthropological Theory 13, no. 1–2 (2013), 3–11.Google Scholar
Cowell, Henry, “Explanation of Symbols and Playing Instructions,” in Piano Music by Henry Cowell (New York: Associated Music, 1960).Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto, The Open Work, translated by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Goehr, Lydia, “Being True to the Work,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47, no.1 (Winter 1989), 55–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goehr, Lydia, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, revised edition (London: Oxford University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Goodman, Nelson, Languages of Art [1968], new edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976).Google Scholar
Gresser, Clemens, “Earle Brown’s ‘Creative Ambiguity’ and Ideas of Co-creatorship in Selected Works,” Contemporary Music Review 26, no. 3/4 (June/August 2007), 377–394.Google Scholar
Harkness, Nicholas, “Softer Soju in South Korea,” Anthropological Theory 13, no. 1–2 (2013), 12–30.Google Scholar
Harkness, Nicholas, Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Hoover, Elizabeth, “Collage and the Feedback Condition of Earle Brown’s Calder Piece,” in Beyond Notation: The Music of Earle Brown, edited by Kim, Rebecca Y. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 159–187.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, edited by Sebeok, Thomas A. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 350–377.Google Scholar
Kanno, Mieko, “Prescriptive Notation: Limits and Challenges,” Contemporary Music Review 26, no. 2 (2007), 231–254.Google Scholar
Karkoschka, Erhard, Notation in New Music: A Critical Guide to Interpretation and Realization, translated by Ruth Koenig (New York: Praeger, 1972).Google Scholar
Kulvicki, John, “Analog Representation and the Parts Principle,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (2015), 165–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963).Google Scholar
Lidov, David, Elements of Semiotics: A Neo-structuralist Perspective, 2nd edition (2017). https://davidlidov.com/about/elements-of-semiotics–2017/Google Scholar
Mavromatis, Panayotis, “A Multi-tiered Approach for Analyzing Expressive Timing in Musical Performance,” in Mathematics and Computation in Music, edited by Chew, Elaine, Childs, Adrian, and Chuan, Ching-Hua (Berlin: Springer, 2009), 193–204.Google Scholar
McKay, Tristan, “Graphic Notations As Creative Resilience in Redman’s Book (2006),” in Semiotics 2018: Resilience in an Age of Relation, edited by Owens, Geoffrey Ross and Katić, Elvira (Charlottesville, VA: Philosophy Documentation Center Press, 2019), 157–171.Google Scholar
Merrell, Floyd, “Charles Sanders Peirce’s Concept of the Sign,” in The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics, edited by Cobley, Paul (London: Routledge, 2001), 28–39.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T, “Pictures and Paragraphs: Nelson Goodman,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 47–74.Google Scholar
Munn, Nancy D, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Nonken, Marilyn, The Spectral Piano: From Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy to the Digital Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parmentier, Richard, Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Peirce, Charles S., Hartshorne, Charles, Weiss, Paul, and Burks, Arthur W., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965).Google Scholar
The Peirce Edition Project, “History” (2015). Accessed December 17, 2019. http://peirce.iupui.edu/#historyGoogle Scholar
The Peirce Edition Project, “Welcome to the Peirce Edition Project” (2015). Accessed December 17, 2019. http://peirce.iupui.edu/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
Redman, Will, “Book,” Will Redman official website (2006). Accessed December 17, 2019. www.willredman.com/book.htmlGoogle Scholar
Redman, Will, “Deck,” Will Redman official website (2016). Accessed December 17, 2019. www.willredman.com/deck.htmlGoogle Scholar
Redman, Will, “Honoring Vertical Excellence,” Will Redman official website (2011). Accessed December 17, 2019. www.willredman.com/hve.htmlGoogle Scholar
Redman, Will, “Long Bio,” Will Redman official website (2010). Accessed December 17, 2019. www.willredman.com/long_bio.htmlGoogle Scholar
Redman, Will, “Scroll,” Will Redman official website (2016). Accessed December 17, 2019. www.willredman.com/scroll.htmlGoogle Scholar
Redman, Will, “Short Bio,” Will Redman official website (2010). Accessed December 17, 2019. www.willredman.com/short_bio.htmlGoogle Scholar
Redman, Will, “Will Redman: Graphic Ideas in Sound,” video interview by Molly Sheridan, New Music Box (blog) (July 27, 2011). Accessed December 17, 2019. https://vimeo.com/26929349Google Scholar
Robey, David, Introduction to The Open Work, by Umberto Eco (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), vii–xxxii.Google Scholar
Ruwet, Nicholas, and Everist, Mark, “Methods of Analysis in Musicology,” Music Analysis 6, no. 1/2 (March–July 1987), 3–9, 11–36.Google Scholar
de Saussure, Ferdinand, Course in General Linguistics [1916], new edition translated by Roy Harris (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986).Google Scholar
Tormey, Alan, “Indeterminacy and Identity in Art,” The Monist 58, no. 2 (April 1974), 203–215.Google Scholar
Tufte, Edward R., The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983).Google Scholar
University of Chicago, “History,” Department of Anthropology. Accessed December 17, 2019. https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/about-us/historyGoogle Scholar
Urban, Greg, “Entextualization, Replication, and Power,” in Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by Silverstein, Michael and Urban, Greg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 21–44.Google Scholar
Waugh, Linda, “The Poetic Function in the Theory of Roman Jakobson,” Poetics Today 2, no. 1a (Autumn 1980), 57–82.Google Scholar
- 9
- Cited by