Have we? We have, however, certainly sidestepped the issue of how "a sound" is itself to be defined. One could apply the word to each constituent component of an orchestral texture, or to the texture itself (or to a recorded sample of that texture used in an electronic composition, which in one way "contains" or "involves" all the myriad actions involved in the original, and in another way doesn't).

To take another Brahmsian example: if you listen to a recording of the beginning of the 1996 FURT composition RIGOR without knowing what it was, you might well think you were listening to a recording of the opening of Brahms' first symphony, which in fact you are, although this multilayered orchestral tutti disintegrates into distortion after a few seconds, revealing itself as (in terms of its musical function) a "sound". Or, momentarily, a possible malfunction in your CD player. (Although this piece hasn't been released in recorded form and has only been performed "live" in front of an audience, in which case there was of course never any misapprehension that there might have been a real orchestra hiding somewhere.)

I'm well aware.  But thanks.

I have read it, and I find it very thought-provoking. Of course, she changes the terms action-oriented and result-oriented to "prescriptive" and "descriptive", which I think is unnecessary... but it then serves to highlight points that are important to her, in ways that more neutral terms may not do.

At no point do I get the sense that she can cite examples in which the sound is purely a by-product of actions. Is she able to execute your piece, The Crutch of Memory, as it is written, or does she make choices based on sound quality? It seems she is using sound to read your piece, to render it most effectively, to 'bring out' the different parameters and their relationship/non-relationship to one another. I imagine if the sounds did not convey this clearly, she would adjust them? Then what if her criteria for clarity differ from yours? I'd be fascinated to hear what vocabulary you use to communicate with her about this in rehearsal!

The Spahlinger example is a little strange. She says half the sounds don't work.. but this is a little beside the point. Spahlinger places a lot of obstacles in the way of a clear action-result relationship. The natural catgut strings make all specialized harmonic techniques much more impractical; then the strings are themselves detuned by up to a major sixth (Violin d-g-d'-g' and Cello ,G-D-G-d); finally, it seems every note requires a different fingering and bowing technique (with obvious and wide-ranging exceptions). For me this is a commentary on the contemporary reception (consumption) of early music. We do not know what Dufay's music sounded like. When we hear today's renditions of it, we are mostly listening to ourselves, yet legitimating our self-involvement by deferring to the authority of history. Spahlinger takes the layers of remove between us and Dufay and makes them into layers of remove between action and result. He thus problematizes nostalgia for a time that never was and cannot be recreated.

Her observation that the piece "consists of sounds and silences on the boundary between perception and illusion" and that "[c]onsequently the identity of the music rests somewhere between what is heard and what is imagined" -- would be a very nice description of the listening experience. But without a sound result to orient oneself to, even if that sound never gets realized, I can't see how the music becomes much more than a technocratic exercise. adieu m'amour would be nothing without Dufay.

So I am still not ready to go from the assertion that action and result are inextricably linked to the notion that they are "the same thing." As I say, that's an interesting premise for compositional inspiration, but it's not a tenable argument.

To go back to your flute/trumpet high-C example, the difference in sound quality does indeed have to do with the effort needed to produce it, but to execute the same action into a trumpet mouthpiece or flute head-joint alone would only be heard as essentially the same action if the two were continually presented side by side until the effort itself became audible as abstracted from the sound. This would make a fascinating piece, I think -- in the right composer's hands. This effort and other such elusive action-parameters are but academic unless placed into a sufficiently sparse context as to become audibly prehensible, made to seem relevant. It's not enough to assert the link between action and result. We have to actually care about that link.

Your website says you're a composer whose "music can be characterized by an uncompromising dedication to instability and fragmentation." I assume those are your own words, but they beg the obvious (and conservative-sounding) question, "How does one commit oneself to instability?" Surely it depends on an agreed notion of what is stable. And we are far from any general agreement about that. Instrumental technique, as it becomes more and more extended, finds ever new islands of stability, as it were; e.g., the 'right' crunching sound as indicated by
in Barrett's air can only be achieved if one judges the pressure evenly and adjusts it in a very complex fashion depending on the desired amplitude, length and thickness of the string, and bow position. If one fetishizes the instability, or subjects the sound to a linear transformation of each parameter irrespective of result, it will simply sound like sh*t. The sound makes the same demands on "tone judgment" as the first note of a Brahms Sonata. With, I'll concede, a somewhat more flexible, if not necessarily more 'liberated' notion of ideal.


A little wayward, but it's a start.   tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick

(FYI, that's quite standard terminology in discussions of notational practice across a wide variety of fields.)

((More on the rest of your post, later.))

In the context of ethnomusicology, where I've heard these terms used before, "prescriptive" refers to notation to be played and "descriptive" to notation that allows us to look at previously un-notated music.  For instance, a transcription of Kwakiutl music (textbook descriptive notation) would have to be quite detailed, verging on "unreadable," in order to also qualify as effective, accurate prescriptive notation.

In our context, however, we seem to be talking about two different categories of prescriptive notation rather than prescriptive and descriptive notations.  This is an important distinction because the nature of that prescription, the performer's interface with the notation, is at the heart of this discussion.

This has obviously been discussed and rephrased in the meantime, but it made me think of Lachenmann; one hobbyhorse of his in the 60s and 70s was exploring possible disjunctions between the physical gesture and the sonic result, something that would be impossible if your statement were true.

me:

But cows have three stomachs, don't they? That would demand three staves in gastric tablature (or four, in your case)...