It's completely open until you make one decision -- and then it's less open. Thinking the left side is the start is already a culturally determined decision (*yawn*) excuse me..

That to me is precisely why this whole subject is interesting.  Aaron, qt, and I would probably be lumped relatively close to each other by the uncautious commentator, particularly from the comfortable distance of the mainstream press or musical culture, by virtue of a shared tendency toward tuplet abuse and the use (fairly constant in Aaron's work and what I know of qt's, at least for strings, but more intermittent in my own) of more staves per instrument than one is accustomed to seeing for the purpose of separating different simultaneous strands of performative activity.  But for me the interest in the graphic repertoire is not only that, pace qt, some of the pieces are quite good, but that they have driven me towards what I find to be a very fruitful conception of what I increasingly regard as the convenient fiction of an ideally transparent notation.

The issue is not so much indeterminacy, although one could likely have quite a fierce debate about the degree to which that is a relevant concept in Aaron's work and in some of my own (particularly the overdetermined bass clarinet piece I mentioned earlier); it is the externalization of the cognitive process by which notation constrains the performer's activities.  Ian's oft-stated idea of notation as negative determinant is quite apt here and also very cogent more generally, I think.  While I don't write graphic scores, both (as I mentioned before) because I feel unqualified to do so and because I'm too interested for the moment in what I'm doing, their influence is profound more generally.

Is that one of the late pieces where there's a more-or-less standard score (with some open structure, perhaps) and then a splodge of geometric shapes?  I've always found those pieces of Maderna's to be unnervingly weak and underbaked, to the point where I wonder if he wrote them under either temporal or medical distress, or both.

What an enviable ratio, my dear sir, if I may say so. 

Actually, the score is not specifically meant to be read from left to right, top to bottom, or anything else along those lines (though it certainly could be, these are only a few of the many, many options).  I'll quote from the prefatory note to Folio (which includes Dec '52 and several other similar-ish works), which includes misc. extracts from Brown's sketchbook from late 1952 ...

"... to have elements exist in space ... space as an infinitude of directions from an infinitude of points in space ... to work (compositionally and in performance) to right, left, back, forward, up, down, and all points between ... the score [being] a picture of this space at one instant, which must always be considered as unreal and/or transitory ... a performer must set this all in motion (time), which is to say, realize that it is in motion and step into it ... either sit and let it move or move through it at all speeds."

"[coefficient of] intensity and duration [is] space forward and back."

"The composition may be performed in any direction from any point in the defined space for any length of time and may be performed from any of the four rotational positions in any sequence.  In a performance utilizing only three dimensions as active (vertical, horizontal, and time), the thickness of the event indicates the relative intensity and/or (where applicable instrumentally) clusters.  Where all four dimensions are active, the relative thickness and length of events are functions of their conceptual position on a plane perpendicular to the vertical and horizontal plane of the score. ... It is primarily intended that performances be made directly from this graphic 'implication' (one for each performer) and that no further preliminary defining of the events, other than an agreement as to total performance time, take place.  Further defining of the events is not prohibited however, provided that the imposed determinate-system is implicit in the score and in these notes."

There's also a cool little graph of a cube that I wish I could copy here, but the caption reads "space relative to conceptual mobility and transformation of events in arbitrary, unstable time."

Welcome, Colin!  Nice to see you here.  (I hope all these American midwesterners don't chase away all the people who actually, um, listen to Radio 3!)


Augenmusik did this once in concert, actually (though, we decided it was better to do before the concert, rather than during, thinking that these weren't really meant to be multimedia works).  We did a cool little slide show thing that had full scores, extreme close-ups of excerpts, bits of the instructions of various pieces we played, etc., all on a kind of random shuffle that played for the 30-40 minutes b/f the concert.  I thought it worked quite well.

Remind me, what is that again?

Welcome, Colin - it seems this forum is attracting many of the most interesting people involved in new music stateside!