Not in the slightest. Only trying to suggest that a flexible notion of and relationship to pulse is by no means in contradiction with the other senses in which we use the word. In that regard music which introduces layers in flexible relationship to a basic pulse, although controlled in the compositional and performance environment, seems to me nothing inherently unnatural.

(maybe some of the composers on this board who employ complex tuplets and the like in their own music might offer some thoughts when they are next here?)

In fact no notation tells you exactly what to do. No one plays 'simple' rhythms with perfect regularity either; it's barely possible (again, except for a computer) and hardly desirable. Inevitably any conscientious performer weighs up the relationship between various rhythmic (or indeed any musical) elements and judges how best to project the relationship between them.

No performance of, say, the first movement of Beethoven's 5th will play the rhythmic motif exactly the same way every time. But only a certain amount of distortion is possible between its presentations before the motif ceases to perform the function of binding the structure together.

There's no need to be unhappy! If what Ian and I have been saying makes you unhappy you don't need to worry about it; you don't need to have this kind of music as part of your life. I do and I'm broadly speaking happy with my (still-evolving!) approach to it, which has as far as I'm concerned nothing to do with intellectual simplification but a lot to do with the most consistent and conscientious musical approach I can manage.

very glad this issue has been raised 

my problem with complex notation is the fetish with calligraphy, ie the more complex it is on the page , or the blacker and irrational filled/nested the rhythms are, the more impressive the music must seem to be. here in D-land, this has certainly been a charge fired at Claus Steffen Mahnkopf, often as a reaction to  CSMs'  own self-glorifying proclamations about his music being the natural progression to his teacher's, Brian Ferneyhough (this and more is expressed in his somewhat alarming and embarrassing book "Kritik der Neuen Musik - Eine Streitschrift"). I'm not against his music (CSM) - some of which I can even find sounding quite good. However I would argue that much of it stems not only from an interest with a certain sonic field/gestural repertoire strongly derived from BF (which I have less of a problem with) but with his interest in , what to my mind seems to be pure calligraphy. The areas where his music is more concerned with graphics, the more grey it ends up sounding, and I find his music is extremely grey, and it doesn't make the performers job much too easy.

I would argue that the exact opposite is true of the BF's music where (although I haven't seen the most recent scores) the primary interest is in the sound it makes. There are players that dis the complexity of the notation arguing that an ideal performance can only attain a certain percentage of what is written. One could argue the same of music written in the 19th Century.

However the arguments against notation using irrational or nested rhythms often end up sounding horribly moralistic, as if it shouldn't be written because its merely pretentious or unreachable for humans full stop. 

Since, as has been mentioned often by members OS & IP it all depends on the music itself, which only remains for an interested performer to simply try and work it out for themselves, and make their own conclusions.


taken at face value the term intellectual simplification does sound depressing, however I assume comrad IP to be addressing the experience where once you're busy confronting the technical & emotional world a piece might be offering, one's own perception about  the most important aspects of the music soon kicks in, perhaps at the expense of some rhythmic accuracy, here, interaction with the composer is not unimperative.

I don't want to get into the fundamentals of this debate - that territory was covered a few months ago in a different thread (title?) with a discussion of Moonlight Sonata v. Ferneyhough in terms of precision demanded - but just say something regarding notational strategies. Shortly after starting to use a wide range of tuplets, I decided that the only honest way both for me to compose with them and present them to performers was to use a spatially accurate notation: 1 cm per semiquaver. That way, leaving aside filtering through tempo changes, the performer can see exactly how different groups compare in terms of speed, the score accurately reflects what entries come when in relation to which others - and most importantly for myself, I know exactly what I'm putting down, where things will sound etc. (assuming an accurate performance). It's always bothered me (and performers of his music, including seasoned ones) that Brian DOESN'T do that; it's not only a hindrance, but also suggests to me that he somehow doesn't prioritise this. If a 2-second bar takes up twice as much space as a 5-second bar, just because it has more notes crammed into it, and the spacing of the notes is more a result of what accidentals and stems are in the way of each other than their intended temporal positioning, doesn't that suggest a lack of attention to important aspects? I find that a particularly pressing question with ensemble pieces - if the score shows two things progressing at pretty much equal speed when in fact one should be significantly faster than the other, this tells me that the composer wasn't thinking about that, because he didn't write it like that. And I don't think that's a result of any anti-positivist attitude to notation, maybe more of a certain laziness.

Those of Brian's sketches I've seen very often show that he's actually done the durational calculations, just for the purpose of establishing which note should follow which on the page. I would certainly also prefer to see the scores proportionally notated but, like Member Dish, I don't think it's laziness that makes him do it otherwise.

My own view of the situation in BF's music is that there are really three justifications (and I should say this is pure conjecture on my part):

First, I think there's a sense that proportional/spatial notation encourages a generalized (or even half-assed) approach to rhythm and duration (that is, it's not so much that it's easier to execute the rhythms w/ spatial notation as that it's easier to fake them).  The lack of spatial notation requires the performer to actually put the instrument down, get out a pencil and a calculator, and figure out the rhythms/durations/alignment between voices/etc.  I fully understand that this seems counterproductive and perhaps even a waste of time, but it means that there's a decoding/deciphering process in learning the rhythms that I think is almost certainly entirely intentional on Ferneyhough's part. 

Second (and much more importantly, I think), I would suggest that a proportional notation gives the sense of a continual (and linear) chronometric/diachronic time as a kind of backdrop, a notion that time ticks across from left to right across the page and then one simply places events in relation to that temporal flow, and that's really not at all what Ferneyhough's music is attempting to do, temporally.

Finally, he's clearly a sucker for tradition, and aspects of tradition in notation.  I think there's actually a concerted effort to orient himself within the tradition, and despite the flamboyance of the notation, it rarely breaks with convention.  (Evan J might be able to address this issue a bit better than I could, as it seems to be important in Ev's music as well.  (To wit, he and I have argued for years and years about his insistence upon all the Italian in his scores .... If I'm remembering right, a significant part of the justification is the traditional role of Italian in music notation.))


All that said, I'm quite meticulous about proportional notation in my own work, and I find some of Ferneyhough's notational conventions quite counterintuitive.  I spent a month or so preparing a conducting score to La chute d'Icare, and I was absolutely flummoxed at some of the spacing errors/inconsistencies (and amused and amazed that both the available commercial recordings seem to follow the (incorrect) spatial layout of the notation, getting the rhythms completely wrong .... which, yes, I understand is a perfect argument for spatialization).

Anyhow ... I'm not intending to defend BF's approach, just taking a wild stab in the dark at a possible justification.  I disagree entirely w/ the implications/accusations of laziness, and would tend to think that he's done it this way for a reason, since, goodness, he's been doing it this way for 40 years and is rather a smart enough fellow to be able to do it differently if he decided he needed/wanted to.