Materializing Sound: Graphic & Symbolic Notation 1951-2012 (original) (raw)

An exhibition held at Sydney Non-Objective (SNO) Gallery in 2015 documents a largely bygone genre, whose significance can be summarized along the following lines: that across two decades of activity there emerged an international language that successfully challenged the hegemony of staff notation by reinstating the interpreter as an active, indeed equal participant in the musical process. Just as importantly, the language by which balance between composer and interpreter was established escaped the stifling modes of ideological determinism evident in early postwar trends, such as the avant-garde movement of serialism and technological developments in electronics like musique concrete. By deepening an identifiably post-Cagean aesthetic, compositional processes became open-ended, allowing for interventions that enabled the musically untrained to participate in the making of musical events. Not dissimilar to the notion of the ‘expanded field’ in relation to sculpture, graphic scores helped enable music to migrate into different fields of creativity such as language, media and painting.