McLaren re: notation

Musical habits include scales, modes, theories of counterpoint and
harmony, and the study of the timbres, singly and in combination of a
limited number of sound-producing mechanisms. In mathematical terms
these all concern discrete steps. They resemble walking -- in the case
of pitches, on steppingstones twelve in number. This cautious stepping
is not characteristic of the possibilities of magnetic tape, which is
revealing to us that musical action or existence can occur at any point
or along any line or curve or what have you ... Since so many inches of
tape equal so many seconds of time, it has become more and more usual
that notation is in space rather than in symbols of quarter, half, and
sixteenth notes and so on.
-- John Cage, 1957

When you agree to work in standard notation, you
automatically agree to a huge number of contraints
on your composition--you agree that there are a
lot of things you simply won't do.
Having no interest in making any such agreement,
it seems obvious to me that multiple simultaneous
time signatures, tempo streams, accelerandi/
decelerandi, multiple simultaneous tunings and
hocketing impossible in a real-world performance
are the absolute minimum any imaginative
composer would settle for....

There is no way to write this piece down using
conventional western notation without so distorting
the notation by tying notes across barlines and
using bizarre accidentals that the structure of the
piece would be completely and utterly obscured.
Thus, the notation for my compositions is: the
original MIDI files.

-- post from mclaren, 1996

Ah Brian, welcome to the Cagean conspiracy. We always knew you were
really one of us.


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/ It isn't enough for yr heart to break because everybody's /
/ heart is broken now --Allen Ginsburg 1962 /

/ Jim Flannery jim@scientia.org /
/ Newgrange Media newgrange@sfo.com /
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