No no.  I wouldn't say that.  I'm actually quite happy to write about this (and in fact have done in print) ... just juggling one too many things today to give a proper reply.

The questions about what constitutes a 'gesture' (both physically and aurally) are at the heart of my thinking over the last several years, so the trick will be writing something that's condensed enough to fit in a normal MB post.



Thanks.  I'm still in a holding pattern, waiting for the work permit to be processed.  So I can't actually do anything to initiate the actual move for a few weeks, still.  Just getting myself prepared.

No!! That would mean that their successors who rebelled against them would have to be known as the "After Eights" and that would be unforgivable.

That apart ... this has the makings of a great thread and as Chafers said, it is a privilege when composers allow is to peer round a crack in the door into the workroom.

I'm afraid it's too late to complain: Pandora's box has been opened. And it certainly wasn't me!

I'd sooner die than misrepresent the work of the Egregious Eight, but I do want to point out a few things in response to RT:

1. Horizontally, if you will, "gesture" can be–and, on the turf of the Egregious Eight, often is–an information-carrying stratum in which transformations of a single gesture, for example, and relationships between different gestures have developmental significance.  In other words, the physical gestures (and, necessarily, the sounding results) are capable of presenting an unfolding, just as sound (i.e. divorced from gesture) can.

2. Vertically, on the other hand, gestures are things that we do all the time in everyday life, so naturally gestures on the stage (whether holding a skull or playing the flute) are packed with associative connotations, some specific (e.g. a "casting a fishing rod"-type gesture) and some quite general (e.g. a "violent" gesture).  These connotations are sometimes "consonant" with and sometimes at odds with the sound that they produce.

I'm sure corrections, if any are in order, will be forthcoming, but I hope this isn't too distorted. Or too obvious.

I don't agree, either. 

Perhaps needless to say, it also goes back rather a lot further than Berio.



(...of course it's a bit hard to rebut the argument that something 'can be seen', isn't it?...)

That tablature is in fact a very old concept was supposed to be implied by the thread title, though I didn't address very old music explicitly.

There is something different about the modern examples cited, however. In the Lupo example, if it had been written in result-notation the execution would not differ significantly than if read from the jpg shown in Member Sudden's post. Mr Lupo employs a standard notational convention, whereas e.g., Barrett in Dampfwerk (working title) makes use of a device to clarify otherwise un-notateable techniques.

That's the beauty of Wikipedia: you can get rid of it yourself!

I think.