That doesn't surprise me about Tudor. Christian Wolff wrote a piece (For pianist) designed to prevent him doing just that !

Considering he was probably the one who ultimately "wrote" some of those pieces by Bussotti, Brown et al, that's not surprising! They would have received less recognition if he hadn't been such an artist himself. This reinforces the problem I've always had with such notation: the composer just hands over his job to the performer, yet gets to put his own name on the result. I'm not saying that for all cases by any means, but that's what I consider the big pitfall (and fallacy).

Indeed so. Given that notation is (in my definition at least, which I hope is useful if not necessarily definitive) a medium of communication between composer and performer(s), what graphic notation often seems to be saying is "please compose this piece for me".

I wasn't meaning to snap the thread but to say what my impression of RHR'S work is. I would prefer to be convinced otherwise!

... and this is different from the "normal" situation how?  I'm being flippant, of course, but the point remains; with a conscientious performer (which I'm not convinced that Tudor was, in this respect, fundamental catalyst though he was in the explosion in the popularity of the relevant repertoire and compositional practices), the ontological provenance of the sounds etc. of performance ought to be of purely extramusical interest.  Ought to be, not that they ever actually can be.

I used to share your view until I participated for a couple years in the graphic-score ensemble that Aaron mentioned earlier.  It was not always a terribly productive experience, to put it mildly, but when it was - in the course of performances of pieces by RHR and Logothetis and Cardew as well as the old warhorses like December 1952 - the experience of being (or trying to be!) a responsible performer of these scores totally changed my attitude towards notation.  It didn't change my praxis in many ways that are visible to the outside observer, I don't think, with the exception of a bass clarinet piece I wrote in the midst of the experience that is thoroughly and blatantly impossible through overdetermination [qt: it's in the mail], but it solidifed my approach to notation as something far more than utilitarian and ideally transparent encoding.

And that, in turn, is my problem with your problem: it seems to imply such a desire, that notation should ideally not have any independent existence except as a carrier of perfectly preservable information; and I know you and your work well enough to know that you don't believe this.  I don't, at any rate, although I have gotten into hot water in my share of master classes and the like as a result of holding forth on the matter.

Maybe to you it is a matter of degree, or a problem of emphasis rather than of fundamental philosophy, and then we'll likely just have to agree that we draw the line in different places (in fact, that I am inclined not to draw it at all).

Or, after all my blathering on, is it literally a question of attribution?

I'm going to do my best after I get home for the night.  Having played quite a lot of this repertoire, I really quite strongly (and fundamentally!) disagree w/ the implication that graphical notation cedes authorship to the performer.  (!!)  I'm going to properly formulate an argument on the train ride home and will report back .....


(edit:  Evan beat me to the punch.)

I hope I'm not nitpicking, but this is so interesting I want to push you a bit further. Don't you slightly revert, in the paragraph I've quoted, to a composer-based viewpoint? What can be done well or badly? The notation of the graphic score? Why are we judging quality at that point if we've agreed the only issue is who gets to take the credit? How are we judging quality at that point if we've agreed the creative work can come at the point of performance? Why must the 'temptation ... be immense' if who takes the credit is trivial?

Nitpick away, but then I really have to get back to work 

I don't agree, and don't think I said (if I implied, then it was my mistake) that "the only issue is who gets to take the credit."  Nor did I ever intend to (fully) relinquish a composer-based viewpoint.  My position is that I'm unwilling to draw a bright line between traditional notation and open/graphic scores at any point.  Accordingly, it certainly does seem possible for a composer to produce a bad rather than a good graphic score, although - just as we all know that a whiz-bang performance can considerably up the effect of a fundamentally weak piece - a performer can redress that problem to a fair degree.

I'm also not sure I agree, although this is significantly stickier, that "the creative work can come at the point of performance," again, as always, compared to "traditional" notation.  Insofar as I was a representative sample of a conscientious and self-aware performer of some of these pieces, I didn't feel - or at least certainly tried not to feel - that I was doing any fundamental creative work outside of the normal domain of the performer.  Certainly there have to be constraints laid upon the performer by him/herself, and usually there ought to be a sense of real-time interaction, but - yet again - the difference is of degree rather than ontology or creative control or whatnot.  This is why I said before that I don't see open notation as a way station between traditional notation and free improvisation.

The danger tha I alluded to is that it must be terribly easy to be lazy, although perhaps "temptation" was the wrong word to use, because I certainly don't mean to imply any sort of malevolence.  To create an effective graphic score, whether it's a Brown/RHR totally-open-to-interpretation type or a Wolff/Logothetis thing with tons of intentionally-difficult-to-reconcile instructions, seems to me almost incomprehensibly difficult, and absolutely impossible without extensive experience in performing in a similar paradigm.  In fact, it occurs to me that I probably feel about that endeavor the way most "civilians" probably feel about composition in the first place.