I'm not sure if I can really accept that unless the performer is somehow specifically contravening the score. If the score allows for such a performance (and all scores allow for many, even the most complex ones), is it necessarily a 'fundamentally weak piece'? One could argue the point that Skempton once made that 'a piece is only as good as its worst performance' (meaning, I think, the worst performance that still adheres in essence to the score), but I find that very prescriptive and doubt many pieces would really pass such a test.

Sorry. What I meant to add was that if your definition of a good score (a traditionally-notated one) is the same thing as a good resulting piece, it's no longer clear to me that 'it certainly does seem possible for a composer to produce a bad rather than a good graphic score'. I only really understood that latter claim in light of your earlier objection to the idea that 'notation should not have any independent existence' ...

This is all extremely interesting but perhaps becoming more about indeterminate notation per se than specifically Haubenstock-Ramati's - shall we have another thread on this? One thought comes to mind - the age-old mantra from performers, proclaiming that the cardinal sin of composers is when they 'don't hear what they've written' becomes, to say the least, rather bizarre in the context of indeterminate works. In the case of graphic or text scores the complaint veers on being meaningless at least in terms of details, but it makes me wonder whether the objection is so absolutely valid in other circumstances? Such as those scores which involve a high degree of complexity, rhythmic or otherwise, that the results may have a degree of unpredictability about them? This whole mantra seems to depend upon the idea of a relatively immutable way 'that the piece sounds'. Any thoughts, especially from you various interesting composers who are posting here and all of whom I know have probably thought about these things much more deeply than most!

Well, one more post, then... really... I swear, I'm never going to finish a piece again.  And this is just a tiny little one, too.  Anyway.

The key word in your passage above is "resulting."  Generally speaking, I suppose you are right that I don't in fact mean to conflate score with piece; I was doing so (implicitly and in retrospect unclearly) with regard only to the vast majority of pieces: those that assume that conflation themselves unproblematically.  The meaning of the word "piece" in this context is uncomfortably slippery, anyway; the relation of score to sound and of performer to audience and of composer to all of the above is not nearly so clear as it can appear when the notational situation behaves better, although this is probably salutary since I'm not sure it's ever as clear as we tend to allow ourselves to think it is, although we may know better.  Sorry about that sentence there  

But I'm not sure I know what I mean by 'piece' in any of this.  It seems to be some sort of ill-defined amalgam of notation, performance situation, and sounding result from the audience (or even recorded) perspective.  I guess what I'm saying is that the experience of performing these pieces alerted me viscerally, in a way that could not be intellected away, to precisely that ill-definition, and how it exists latently in even quite traditional situations.  I don't want to claim, so settle down qt, that this is a particularly "musical" virtue, or that it makes the repertoire worthwhile.  But I do want to claim that it is worthwhile for the systems of play it can set up within this hazy universe.  Insert whatever quasi-Deleuzianisms you like here:                         .

While I'm at it, it's also entirely possible that the badness of a bad graphic score is clear only to the performer, and not necessarily to the audience.  This doesn't strike me as a crippling philosophical problem, although it does of course point straight back to the original questions of attribution, in which I am less interested.  Can a motivated and capable performer make a "bad" graphic score sound as "good" (don't make me define that, I didn't participate in the other thread for a reason!) as a "good" one? Certainly.  To me that poses a problem only for performing rights agencies and jealous colleagues.

Goodness.  All I did was go to the post office to mail Ollie his software, to the liquor store to buy a bottle of Tripel Karmeliet, get on the train and go home, and now I'm already several pages behind the discussion.

As Evan has argued more eloquently than I can (and has beaten me to most of the points I was going to make here), I'll take a slightly different approach and talk a bit about my (our) experiences performing some of these works.  What I have noticed over the years (and, most notably in Augenmusik, but also here at Northwestern in the Experimental Music course I taught in the autumn) -- and I realize this opens up an enormous can of worms -- is that there is in fact a quite substantial range of quality w/in pieces which use graphical notation, and, perhaps more surprisingly, there's very little to predict how much (or even what kind of) information the 'good' works have as opposed to the 'bad' ones.

What I've noticed, though, (and I think this seems to work quite well w/ RB's and qt's comments) is that the better works have quite a high degree of resistance.  It's important to note, though, that this has absolutely nothing to do w/ the amount of ink on the page, nor w/ exactly what is prescribed by the notation.  Like qt, I do think the results matter.  (I'm frankly a bit miffed at the notion that one might perform this work just for kicks w/o any interest in the resulting sound -- and, frankly, this seems particularly ironic from qt, as this is nearly an identical attack that's made towards highly (over-?)notated music, as well.)  It's this rubric that's most important in evaluating these works -- what we noticed in our very detailed work in Augenmusik was that certain pieces, no matter how hard we tried, no matter how many different approaches we used, no matter what the instrumentation or the approach to the notation or whatever ... simply didn't work.  They simply didn't sound good in the end.

To make things a bit more explicit ...

December 1952 is a lousy piece.  We tried and tried and tried ... we tried literally hundreds of different readings of the score, different ensemble formations, spatialization of players, all of us trying the same approach to the score, all of us trying different approaches .... it just never clicked.  It always sounded flaccid and quite ordinary.  On the other hand, Christian Wolff's Edges, which gave us a good bit of trouble in the first month or two we worked on the piece, ended up working brilliantly, and, despite any number of variations in the actual details of the sounding result, it was always identifiable as a performance of Edges (which is, I would think, another important criterion for determining the 'success' of a graphical score).  The difference in the Wolff is in the degree of resistance -- in this case, it's almost entirely mental/psychological, forcing the performer(s) to navigate a minefield of conflicting instructions (all indicated w/ very simple graphical symbols).  It was one of the real revelations of our time as an ensemble, and became one of our signature pieces.

In a sense, the success of the Wolff seemed to stem from the fact that the score pushed back.  The Brown offered no real resistance -- it was somehow too malleable.  But -- and this is crucial -- the two scores contain almost exactly the same amount of data/detail, and in many ways, the Wolff is the more 'open' of the two.

Since Evan prompted me ... a quick list of pieces in graphical notation that I find particularly interesting/successful/engaging.  In each case, I've either participated in a performance w/ sounds/structures/experiences that I greatly enjoy or heard them from the audience.

Wolff:  Edges
Logothetis:  the Kulmination series
RHR:  Multiple 5
Jurg Frey:  Stuecke ('75)

And the following ren't so much 'graphical scores,' but they're still extremely open notations:
Globokar:  La Ronde
Wolff:  Sticks
Kosugi:  Anima 7
Brecht:  Drip Music


There are loads of others, but that at least gets some names down.

I wanted to add something else, re the Tudor composition issue.

I would argue, though w/ all due respect (!), that Tudor was very much in the wrong for writing out prescribed versions of these graphical scores.  For my way of thinking, it's no better to write out a 'composed' version of a graphical score than it would be to, say, make a Logothetis-esque graphical score of, say, one of Richard's pieces and then play from that.  The notation is what it is for a reason.

But doesn't that depend upon the piece? With Solo for Piano, say, in many cases it would be impossible to convert the symbols in the score into sound at sight without an extreme degree of approximation, sometimes so much so as to make the score relatively irrelevant. Quite a few of those Cage pieces I see as sets of instructions for creating pieces (same is true of some of Schnebel's earlyish works) rather than actual scores to be played off. The extent to which this is true varies between composers and pieces.