Ian - sorry, it was meant as a light-hearted comment but obviously went down the wrong way (which probably means that I annoyed you more than I intended last night). Have sent you an email. I'll try and stick to the music, but quite happy listening in as others discuss for a while as I'm supposed to be finishing some work.

<don't know where to find the dove/beer smilies but hope you'll accept one of each>

Certainly the inception of electronic music in itself, and the exploration of the implications of this by the people you mention, was necessarily a more "major innovation" than any that have followed, in terms of compositional thinking, but my impression is that what's going on now is anything but a fizzling out.
Yes. Improvisation is, as far as I'm concerned, a method of composition, and therefore people who do it are ipso facto composers.

Yes I do, and (I don't know whether this is indicative or not) only a very small proportion of the postgraduate "composition" students I work with are principally "composers" in the narrow (20th century!) usage of the term. I have no problem with describing someone like Louis Armstrong as a composer, especially since he was a much more exploratory improviser than the other two examples you mention (in his early career of course!). Composition is a matter of degree whether you do it with notes or with sounds - if "composition" can include the pieces by John Oswald on last week's "Hear and Now", in which not a single note was written as such by Oswald, it can certainly include Armstrong's contribution to "West End Blues". Anyway, returning to technology for a moment, I think that the use of electronics in improvisation is a confluence of strands which has implications far beyond the "extremely marginal" world of improvised music, which actually is not much more marginal than contemporary notated composition, especially on the continent.

In terms of what we're talking about, though, viz. the dividing of music history into periods, isn't the really crucial thing the question of archiving/documentation. What sort of preservation (CD recording, eyewitness accounts, what else???) is necessary to make improvisation or any other compositional practice available for consideration by music historians (whether we take that as referring to 'historians of the present' (i.e. musicologists?) or the future historians who will look back on the early 21st century as part of their past)?

That's very important and draws attention to the fact that musical historians (though not jazz historians, say) up until now seem still to have treated written texts as the most important documents, rather than recordings (that is changing, but slowly). Could a recording of an improvisation itself be considered as something akin to another type of 'written work', so to speak? Taking on a material form, an objective presence, from the fact of having been committed to a permanent medium? In Rosen's review of New Grove, he points out the woeful inadequacy of the entries on jazz musicians (including that on Miles Davis) that do not give discographies, surely the most important form of documentation in this medium.

Yes, of course an innovative approach to notation per se is not a new phenomenon (q.v. the Ars Subtilior thread on the
other topic, wherever it is!!) - but I was suggesting that it is particularly charged now as a sort of "defensive maneuver"
in a new way (although, come to think of it, the chronological parallels between the notational explosions of the 1960s and
the concomitant rise of tape technologies is interesting, and something I've not at all thought about until right this second), as I think that writing music down in more or less traditional ways will become increasingly less a "default" position than a polemical one, and thus that it needs already to be taken more seriously as such.  I think there will come a point, which I believe is already visible from here, wherein one would not write music down in a traditional sense unless one had an active reason to do so.  This was certainly not the case in the 1960s, although the threat from then-new sound production and reproduction technologies, as I've just mentioned, is worth considering.


First of all I want to make it clear that I'm not necessarily talking about "indeterminate notation" per se, rather any sort of writing that produces an aesthetically active notation, rather than one that is notionally neutral (although there is of course no such thing, it seems the vast majority of composers would prefer to act as though there were!). In this sense Ferneyhough in his time (in the 1970s, anyway) was as relevant to this train of thought as Cage/Feldman/Schnebel etc., all of whose innovations - both in particular praxes and in a general approach to the act of writing music down - seem to have been lost on a vast majority of composers; I expect, or at least certainly hope, a resurgence is in order as a rearguard action against (or perhaps less against than alongside) the advance of technological modes of transmission.

The performance issue is its own beast.  As I mentioned, a (for me) very positive corollary of the above would be the struggle for survival of contemporary music that seeks to exist on the terms of earlier repertoires.  For what I can see, such a phenomenon should be impossible now, prevalent though it still is; but as a defining feature of "21st-century music" it might well become more so (impossible, that is, not prevalent) - as a combined result of the increasingly secure status of recordings as the primary media of musical experience and the increasingly comprehensive infiltration of electronic technology into composition and performance as well, except among those composers for whom avoidance of those technologies is an active motivator.

And don't even get me started on composers who uncritically and uncomplainingly use Finale/Sibelius without considering what it is they are doing.  Thank you.

I'm not so sure about that access being limited, and certainly not for financial reasons. It's possible that the infrastructure of education and experience (that whole history of post-war German radio stations setting up studios etc.) is lacking in Central and South America - I don't know, I don't really know any musicians there - but I've spent some time in Mexico (with Mexicans, rather than as a tourist) and certainly they have as many mobile phones, playstations, laptops etc. as you'd find over here. Nor is money a particular obstacle, unless you're poor - in which case you're really really poor, and probably none of the composition students there would come from such a background, since the sort of exclusionary social considerations you've been talking about in the West today are magnified massively in Mexico and Brazil (and, I imagine, in the rest of South America).