Another post here states that “The history of IT is a history of decoupling,” and arguably, a similar trend was characteristic of mid-century Western art music composition, especially evident in the increased parametric approach to sound qualities by serialist composers (e.g. Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen) and a subsequent generation of musicians applying these principles to performative gesture (for one modern example, Wieland Hoban’s “when the panting STARTS”, a piano work with a stave for each of the player’s fingers). Decoupling and other notational complexities are one of many strategies that could be considered characteristic of an ‘avant-garde’ protocol in Western art music composition, but as a ‘pilling’ procedure the overall reception is highly uneven in its distribution (a specialized “new music” community” alongside the bastions of traditionalists).
As a means of standardizing communication, musical staff notation has been a highly effective protocol, in no small part due to its capacity for leakiness (‘expression’) and adaptability making such standardization enormously asymptotic. So where ‘pilling’ can be concerned, my hope is to make connections between explicit protocol research and musical experimentation through a “musical alternative interpretations kit” — a ‘meta-score’ providing a means for individuals or ensembles to re-read, or decouple-recouple, the symbols of conventional musical repertoire while retaining a collective yet emergent understanding of this new interpretation.
Faced with the challenge of balancing a new symbol system and the pre-existing “virtual structure” of the musical work, indeterminate spaces may emerge which provide novel opportunities for actions that are improvisatory in their moment-to-moment nature, yet model the balance between novelty and shared legibility of extensions of possibility afforded by virtual musical structures (thus providing new insights into the original structures and the situation of instantiation itself). If, for example, an orchestra uses the score of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to make a cohesive sonic experience that sounds nothing like the previously-agreed conception of the symphony, what does that say about a) the orchestra, b) the symphony, c) the legibility of such a protocol for aesthetic function or beyond?
This project entails the creation of a ‘kit’ which provides sets of instructions, suggestions, and tools for reassigning the various information in a musical score, one which should ideally be agreed upon if realized by a group. Past precedent for such work include the use of transparencies by composers such as John Cage and Anthony Braxton, or the “Popular Classics” methods of the Scratch Orchestra.
By bringing an artistic research project into the sphere of protocol research, my hope is that a productive dialogue can ensue that gives greater clarity to the language and protocols of the former. On the other hand, coming in here as an artist, I also hope to offer an instance demonstrating the viability of ‘non-technological’ performance projects as ‘safe’ spaces for prototyping methods of shared legibility.