DENMARK'S INTUITIVE MUSIC CONFERENCE 2001

Carl (acting as a moderator): try all of you to describe a piece you know that has space for improvisation and tell us about its virtues!

Blaise: As a student, I drew a piece of bark and played from it. This was my first encounter with a graphic score, and it opened up new concepts of sound: making up the music during playing and doing things which could not have been done from traditional notation.

Henriette: I see a conflict between words and musical elements, I'd like to bridge that gap.

Roman: I'd like to invent a language which would be eaisily understandable in order to make the distance between composer and performer shorter. Maybe something like this would be easy to understand:

Henriette: for who's sake?

Roman: in the last session, my head became overloaded.

Henriette: in my Danish music therapy education, we used a lot of words.

Ge-Suk: my graphic notations are a preparation to be free.

Henrik: "Changeable Spring" by Johan Toft I remember as having symbols notated very clearly in colors and with a time line, easy to follow.

Carl: (showing the piece): "Edges", a classic piece by Chr. Wolf (1969) is one of my favourites among many graphical and verbally notated compositions. One can go around freely in this "landscape", but one should consider as many of them as possible. The sound gets many dimensions and there's a very sensitive playing.

Frank: I'm lazy! Instead of long fights on paper, I once used a coffee cup as a "score" to play from.

Roman: Yury Skibanov wrote a piece "Rickerkar" in the shape of two spirals - looks good even if in standard notation.

Blaise: I went to a lecture by Anthony Braxton who has an elaborate system which is very precise, though. If we played the old hieroglyphs as music, would that be right or wrong?

Ge-Suk: what do you think of calling graphic notations "half-improvisations" ?

Carl: maybe it could suit your pieces, except for the rather exact direction you gave us about "long slightly sliding tones".

Roman: I think of a Russian study of kinds of improvisation in World Music. Freedom is relative: it means to follow yourself, not a system. So there can be no half-improvisation, only 100%.

Ge-Suk: maybe 99%.

Roman: you can be free in the choice of language, not in total independence of cultural conditions, education, family etc. - Beginning, development and end is universal to all music

Henriette: both body and head are great, but I would like more body

Henrik: exactly how archetypical can a notation be?

Carl: there are objective and expressive dimensions

Roman: it would be good to have a common language despite different customs.

Carl: maybe it's better to have empathy, feeling for each other's universes, why should they be standardized

Blaise: people like music because they think they understand it. 

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