Some of my favourite graphic scores are Brian Eno’s, for Music for Airports, Thursday Afternoon and so forth. On the one hand, they’re crisp and methodical, with precise meaning for the composer. But on the other, they’re runic and mysterious, open to interpretation as graphic artworks in their own right.
The reason why Cardew came to hate avant garde music was due to his newfound political beliefs. He became a Maoist in the wake of the 1968 protests and he denounced the avant-garde movement as bourgeoise, specifically Hymnen by Stockhausen which, according to him, was a glorification of capitalist and fascist countries. I respect his political beliefs, as I myself am a leftist, but I disagree with his stance on avant-garde music, as I believe the reason why avant garde became a thing in the first place was to challenge the bourgeois forms of music that was popular.
Now there's only one question left: Can someone without reference reproduce your video based on your drawings as an alternate form of notation of your script?
Traditional notation does not contain information about intonation because it finished developing significantly before intonation really became standardized to the degree that we have it today, and as some might put it, in a way that "defines order down to the point that it does".
I think Savant should have been referenced for midi art as he is where Andrew Huang got the inspiration. Andrew Huang is great and all, but i think Savant made it popular.
I was just thinking about notation the other day! Always cool when an upload coincides like that. It seems like although standard musical notation is very pure and clearly well-suited for a host of applications there are some things that are beyond it, such as panning as you mentioned and just about everything else in the digital realm. A lot of tracks you'll hear within certain genres have sound design that has a hard-to-pin-down timbre even internally as a listener, so designing some kind of standardized, formal notation for it has an extra layer of ambiguity (ie is there some measurable threshold where a sound changes from 'muffled' to 'resonating'? Or 'metallic' to 'wet'?). Since this video shows you're not afraid to tackle digital developments in music, would you be willing to discuss pitch bending? I've been wondering how it fits into theory. I know it's far from a modern development but I'd wager that it is much more prevalent in electronic music than most other (western) genres. Some questions I've had are about how the microtones that arise during a bend harmonize with non-bent instruments. Or interesting distances to bend, rather than just an octave or a fifth. Or non-traditional shapes that do more than just slope down or slope up -- maybe combining the two, or oscillating like a triangle wave. It feels like pitch bends like these often break into a realm of theory that I've heard little about (granted I'm a complete amateur and have little more than beginner training).
I only know a little about this but I know that in Indian classical music you’ll have microtonal bends that occur as part of a raga and are kind of like licks or the tiny phrasing notes that are added. Pitch bending is largely a very melodic tool and serves as such because usually the main harmony in Indian classical is a drone or the rough pitch of the tabla. I would guess the microtones perceived in an equal volume context would be very interesting though.
Awesome video as always. But I try to show it to my Brazilian friends who are not as keen on English as me and they have a hard time understanding the idea. Should I try to translate the video?
Yo, 12Tone. I remember you mentioned in an earlier video about perfect pitch…and I suppose that I have it (since I can recognize any note in 12TET by simply hearing it)-but it's not "perfect." I.e. I cannot tell whether the note is out-of-tune within five cents. So my question is this: what would you call that? Tonal memory, perhaps? It wasn't in-born. I had developed this skill through repeatedly tuning my guitar without a tuner.
I was reading a thread on Quora last night about Quantum Mechanics and other difficult to understand physics ideas and somebody actually compared mathematics and physics to music notation and music itself. He said in order to even begin to understand QM you need to know the mathematics, otherwise you'll only have vague ideas in your head about what is actually happening. He said the math is what truly describes how the theories work while any other description is merely an imperfect description meant to please our physically oriented brains. Of course music isn't so complicated that you have to know notation to understand it or use it, but I feel the comparison is apt in describing how music notation is not nearly as descriptive as people imagine. At the end of the video you even demonstrate the short comings of it, so using an even simpler form of notation like a graphical score almost seems like a waste of time. It would be like doing math using nothing but dots and lines. A score can be interpreted in many different ways as it is already. Modern pop and rock music scores have always been disappointing to me because they never deliver the amount of information I want. Articulations that are present and obvious in a recording are completely glossed over, and too many covers I listen to are awful because the artist doing the cover misses so many of these nuances that bring life to the song. I guess you could say the score is more of an overview of a piece, and the real devil is in the details.
There is also the idea that a map is not territory, and while deferring that maths are hugely important to science, having an equation that explains something like the double slit experiment without seeing it for yourself is just as muddled. The difficulty being your physically oriented brain has no frame of reference for what happens at a quantum scale and therefore _must_ rely on abstractions like math or maps. Similarly, even if I had near perfect notation of something like _Rockaway Beach_ and brought it to the 17th century to be performed, it would loose much of the flavor and swagger as there isn't even a conception of bubble-gum punk that _can_ be conveyed through an abstraction. You really need to experience it for yourself. Much like how a novel conveys information yet is open to interpretation, the same is going to happen with any set of abstract symbols (even music itself). Even the same performer performing the same piece is going to have variations, hence when a band is on fire or having an off day.
How cool would it be, if you would gift those sheets to one of your viewers after each video. Love from Berlin, your Channel is awesome, keep on inproving and you will get big one day!!!
I would love to hear you talk about "Ministry of Lost Souls" by Dream Theater, since it arranges in a particular way the classic Pop Chord progression in the Am key (Am F C G or I VI III VII), and also i'd like to know more about relative minors, dominant chords and modulation. I really love your videos, keep this up!!
Hey, I'm writing a song and want to use the chord progression CM7 - AbM7 - Bb6 - CM7 (or some variation close to that). I want to play it on guitar and have the CM7 down, duh, but can't figure out the other two in a playable manner. I'm a pianist and still probably a beginner guitarist, but I can teach myself chords very easily. Any tips?
Hey 12tone, I like the concept for the video. Would definitely check out Snowforms by R. Murray Schafer. The Vancouver Chamber Choir has a nice video with the graphic score.
Staves is the plural of Staff, I say staff with a short a and staves with a long a. I'm from New Zealand so it might be different from people from the States.
Cool! Not sure if appropriate, but I've done some graphic notation for another composer! Relevant bit starts at page 3, rehearsal letter M: www.serveer.nl/_loadAsset.cfm?id=NED01-N98&asset=assets/pdf-scores/Ned-McGowan---Volt-(2015)-(preview).pdf You can listen to it, too. That part starts at 5:10: nedmcgowan.bandcamp.com/track/volt-for-violin-tape
@chazz30000 - "So usefull." - You use incomplete sentences, so you apparently don't mind letting the reader connect the dots of your intended meanings, either.
I thought graphic scores were visual art and not actual compositions (like Faire's Aire and Death Waltz only more so) until I watched this video, interesting.
IMO, stuff like Cardew turns composition into a lazy fake. By putting so much onus on the performer to figure out what the composition means, the composer is effectively dumping the actual job of composition onto the performer. In which case, why call the composer a composer at all? It's like making someone else do your job while pretending that doing so means you're actually really awesome at that job. Leaves a bad taste to me. I'm all for improvements in notation, or alternate forms of actual notation (especially to keep up with the technological times), but I give the thumbs-down to what, in my view, amounts to conceit masked as cleverness via abuse of notation (and performers).
TheBookDoctor honestly I don't think 12 tone explained this stuff very well at all. I'm doing a sound art course and the way graphics scores are explained as being are less about putting the onus of creativity on the performer but rather an elective and mutual rejection of what is considered a descriptive and rigidly tonal way of organising music.
It’s more about liberation than laziness: relinquishing the absolute control of the composer to liberate the performers. The composer still has a role, but it’s more as a mentor or guide than as a dictator. The performer becomes a collaborator or co-composer rather than the mindless serf carrying out the composer’s will. It’s relevant that many of the composers who embrace these techniques also espouse Buddhism, anti-capitalist politics, or other philosophies that encourage the abandonment of absolute control in favour of chance, collaboration and the unconscious.
![How to improve your musical handwriting / notation [General Tips]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TrZ-sZ5aTD4/mqdefault.jpg)
![How to improve your musical handwriting / notation [General Tips]](/img/tr.png)
Some of my favourite graphic scores are Brian Eno’s, for Music for Airports, Thursday Afternoon and so forth. On the one hand, they’re crisp and methodical, with precise meaning for the composer. But on the other, they’re runic and mysterious, open to interpretation as graphic artworks in their own right.
One of the best channels on UA-cam! Keep it up.
The reason why Cardew came to hate avant garde music was due to his newfound political beliefs. He became a Maoist in the wake of the 1968 protests and he denounced the avant-garde movement as bourgeoise, specifically Hymnen by Stockhausen which, according to him, was a glorification of capitalist and fascist countries. I respect his political beliefs, as I myself am a leftist, but I disagree with his stance on avant-garde music, as I believe the reason why avant garde became a thing in the first place was to challenge the bourgeois forms of music that was popular.
Now there's only one question left: Can someone without reference reproduce your video based on your drawings as an alternate form of notation of your script?
Funckgerät Haha true!
Actually: if you do something like Animation Storey Boarding: Yes, yes you can, and that's what it's supposed to do.
Clever
I love how you draw the rabbit duck thing!
Love your videos :) Keep up the great work! ^^
Also, Applebaum's The Metaphysics of Notation is worth mentioning. And loads of other works of his.
i got to play a graphic work in a group and it was extremely fun (for us) i highly recommend it
A fun thing to do is to listen to a piece you like and make a graphic score as you listen. Try it!
It's kind of similar to some exercises we did waaaay back in first grade, but for adults. I like it.
+rosemary That's exactly what I was thinking of! (Although it was later than first grade for me and we don't call them grades in the UK.)
That looks really cool!!
Traditional notation does not contain information about intonation because it finished developing significantly before intonation really became standardized to the degree that we have it today, and as some might put it, in a way that "defines order down to the point that it does".
Awesome video - thank you so much
I think Savant should have been referenced for midi art as he is where Andrew Huang got the inspiration. Andrew Huang is great and all, but i think Savant made it popular.
I was just thinking about notation the other day! Always cool when an upload coincides like that. It seems like although standard musical notation is very pure and clearly well-suited for a host of applications there are some things that are beyond it, such as panning as you mentioned and just about everything else in the digital realm. A lot of tracks you'll hear within certain genres have sound design that has a hard-to-pin-down timbre even internally as a listener, so designing some kind of standardized, formal notation for it has an extra layer of ambiguity (ie is there some measurable threshold where a sound changes from 'muffled' to 'resonating'? Or 'metallic' to 'wet'?).
Since this video shows you're not afraid to tackle digital developments in music, would you be willing to discuss pitch bending? I've been wondering how it fits into theory. I know it's far from a modern development but I'd wager that it is much more prevalent in electronic music than most other (western) genres. Some questions I've had are about how the microtones that arise during a bend harmonize with non-bent instruments. Or interesting distances to bend, rather than just an octave or a fifth. Or non-traditional shapes that do more than just slope down or slope up -- maybe combining the two, or oscillating like a triangle wave. It feels like pitch bends like these often break into a realm of theory that I've heard little about (granted I'm a complete amateur and have little more than beginner training).
I only know a little about this but I know that in Indian classical music you’ll have microtonal bends that occur as part of a raga and are kind of like licks or the tiny phrasing notes that are added. Pitch bending is largely a very melodic tool and serves as such because usually the main harmony in Indian classical is a drone or the rough pitch of the tabla. I would guess the microtones perceived in an equal volume context would be very interesting though.
Nice work! You may also want to link to Savant’s drawings, which Huang referenced.
Awesome video as always. But I try to show it to my Brazilian friends who are not as keen on English as me and they have a hard time understanding the idea. Should I try to translate the video?
Yo, 12Tone.
I remember you mentioned in an earlier video about perfect pitch…and I suppose that I have it (since I can recognize any note in 12TET by simply hearing it)-but it's not "perfect." I.e. I cannot tell whether the note is out-of-tune within five cents.
So my question is this: what would you call that? Tonal memory, perhaps? It wasn't in-born. I had developed this skill through repeatedly tuning my guitar without a tuner.
I was reading a thread on Quora last night about Quantum Mechanics and other difficult to understand physics ideas and somebody actually compared mathematics and physics to music notation and music itself. He said in order to even begin to understand QM you need to know the mathematics, otherwise you'll only have vague ideas in your head about what is actually happening. He said the math is what truly describes how the theories work while any other description is merely an imperfect description meant to please our physically oriented brains.
Of course music isn't so complicated that you have to know notation to understand it or use it, but I feel the comparison is apt in describing how music notation is not nearly as descriptive as people imagine. At the end of the video you even demonstrate the short comings of it, so using an even simpler form of notation like a graphical score almost seems like a waste of time. It would be like doing math using nothing but dots and lines. A score can be interpreted in many different ways as it is already. Modern pop and rock music scores have always been disappointing to me because they never deliver the amount of information I want. Articulations that are present and obvious in a recording are completely glossed over, and too many covers I listen to are awful because the artist doing the cover misses so many of these nuances that bring life to the song. I guess you could say the score is more of an overview of a piece, and the real devil is in the details.
There is also the idea that a map is not territory, and while deferring that maths are hugely important to science, having an equation that explains something like the double slit experiment without seeing it for yourself is just as muddled. The difficulty being your physically oriented brain has no frame of reference for what happens at a quantum scale and therefore _must_ rely on abstractions like math or maps.
Similarly, even if I had near perfect notation of something like _Rockaway Beach_ and brought it to the 17th century to be performed, it would loose much of the flavor and swagger as there isn't even a conception of bubble-gum punk that _can_ be conveyed through an abstraction. You really need to experience it for yourself.
Much like how a novel conveys information yet is open to interpretation, the same is going to happen with any set of abstract symbols (even music itself).
Even the same performer performing the same piece is going to have variations, hence when a band is on fire or having an off day.
How cool would it be, if you would gift those sheets to one of your viewers after each video. Love from Berlin, your Channel is awesome, keep on inproving and you will get big one day!!!
MIDI art was firtsly used by producer extraordinaire Aleksander Vinter aka Savant i believe :)
I would love to hear you talk about "Ministry of Lost Souls" by Dream Theater, since it arranges in a particular way the classic Pop Chord progression in the Am key (Am F C G or I VI III VII), and also i'd like to know more about relative minors, dominant chords and modulation. I really love your videos, keep this up!!
ANDREW HUANG!!!!
I'm now going to one of my musician friends who took art and ask them to write one of these.
0:14 I go, "Oh, cool, we're playing Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima."
Very informative.
How would the 4'33" graphic score would look like?
Probably something like this: www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/blank-paper-on-desk-with-a-pen-royalty-free-image/175598824
12tone Makes sense
That, or a photograph of a snipe.
Actually:
www.gearslutz.com/board/attachments/remote-possibilities-in-acoustic-music-and-location-recording/208327d1292210616-so-i-just-recorded-john-cages-433-quot-cage_4_33_score.jpg
Isn't it in standard notation? I believe it is just a series of rests, with a page turn. Might be wrong though.
Hey, I'm writing a song and want to use the chord progression CM7 - AbM7 - Bb6 - CM7 (or some variation close to that). I want to play it on guitar and have the CM7 down, duh, but can't figure out the other two in a playable manner. I'm a pianist and still probably a beginner guitarist, but I can teach myself chords very easily. Any tips?
Hey 12tone, I like the concept for the video. Would definitely check out Snowforms by R. Murray Schafer. The Vancouver Chamber Choir has a nice video with the graphic score.
See also: Vangelis. He has his own notation (that can be seen here: ua-cam.com/video/3b1xJYCrKDU/v-deo.html ).
1:39-1:41 -- you pronounce "staves" with a short "a". I always thought it was pronounced with a long "a" (staves rhymes with save, not have).
fudgesauce And you understood what he meant, so does it really matter?
Different people have different accents buddy.
Where are you from? In the US and Canada, the majority of us (meaning those of us with native accents) pronounce it with a short "a"
It's a regional dialect.
Staves is the plural of Staff, I say staff with a short a and staves with a long a. I'm from New Zealand so it might be different from people from the States.
I slowed down your video to .75 speed and I like it more.
Cool! Not sure if appropriate, but I've done some graphic notation for another composer!
Relevant bit starts at page 3, rehearsal letter M:
www.serveer.nl/_loadAsset.cfm?id=NED01-N98&asset=assets/pdf-scores/Ned-McGowan---Volt-(2015)-(preview).pdf
You can listen to it, too. That part starts at 5:10: nedmcgowan.bandcamp.com/track/volt-for-violin-tape
Something completely different = giant foot (a la Monty Python) love it!
So it's a less precise way of noting music with extra homework build in. So usefull.
@chazz30000 - "So usefull." - You use incomplete sentences, so you apparently don't mind letting the reader connect the dots of your intended meanings, either.
Can you explain shape notes?
can you do an understand on tame impala alter ego??
"The Pioneers of black MIDI"
I thought graphic scores were visual art and not actual compositions (like Faire's Aire and Death Waltz only more so) until I watched this video, interesting.
Please do Aqualung by Jethro Tull
QnA hey twelve tone why do you use an elephant for the drawings
It's his little character
It's easy to draw and very recognizable.
*plays trumpet with nose*
I cant tell what that fancy letter is supposed to be
Yeah, I was a little worried that I'd overdone it. This is why no one asks me to decorate medieval manuscripts anymore...
B
Asher D yeah i was just kidding
Nerds oh
I thought it was an E
Do you ever screw up a drawing and have to start again?
Hiii guys
So... you gonna talk about black midi?
I'm glad Cardew got out of this avantgarde (well that's a word i misspelled) phase
IMO, stuff like Cardew turns composition into a lazy fake. By putting so much onus on the performer to figure out what the composition means, the composer is effectively dumping the actual job of composition onto the performer. In which case, why call the composer a composer at all? It's like making someone else do your job while pretending that doing so means you're actually really awesome at that job. Leaves a bad taste to me.
I'm all for improvements in notation, or alternate forms of actual notation (especially to keep up with the technological times), but I give the thumbs-down to what, in my view, amounts to conceit masked as cleverness via abuse of notation (and performers).
TheBookDoctor honestly I don't think 12 tone explained this stuff very well at all. I'm doing a sound art course and the way graphics scores are explained as being are less about putting the onus of creativity on the performer but rather an elective and mutual rejection of what is considered a descriptive and rigidly tonal way of organising music.
They're also far more conducive to improvisation if you're working without (and tbh sometimes even with) the classical western suite of instruments
It’s more about liberation than laziness: relinquishing the absolute control of the composer to liberate the performers. The composer still has a role, but it’s more as a mentor or guide than as a dictator. The performer becomes a collaborator or co-composer rather than the mindless serf carrying out the composer’s will. It’s relevant that many of the composers who embrace these techniques also espouse Buddhism, anti-capitalist politics, or other philosophies that encourage the abandonment of absolute control in favour of chance, collaboration and the unconscious.
+voltlife Yay, postmodernism.... >.>
Technically, your drawings could count as a graphic score.
I was expecting nudity 🤷♂️
I can actually read midi better than I can read standard notation. I’m weird.
So what you're saying is graphic scores is a big fraud. You might as well "play" the Voynich manuscript.
boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo how dare you be to fast