Contents
In our overview of the history of music notation over the last two weeks, we tried to do two things. First, we wanted to broaden the scope of what constitutes a musical document in general. To this end, we looked at a wide range of documents from the history of music notationﾑa history biased, admittedly, towards the very old and the very new: ancient and medieval notation, graphic scores, listening instructions, analyses, drawings of sound-spaces, and imaginary compositions. Within this broad conceptual framework, however, we wanted to highlight the technological specificity of any particular musical document. Notation acts like a camera that focuses on one particular musical concept or another. The page frames an image of musical content; as the notation system changes, so does that content.
The simile of a camera is not coincidental. Today, I would like to pursue both lines of thought with a lecture on music notation and film. I hope that this lecture will clarify some of the conceptual issues we have been discussing: the collapse of the imaginary walls separating specialized staff notation from other symbols and alphabets, scores from art objects, and analytic musical documents from compositional ones. I also hope it will convince you, if you weren't convinced already, of the specificity of music notation's framing, of its power to focus the viewer on musical content. Finally, I'd like to throw yet another wrench in the works by using film to challenge the idea that music notation should represent a musical event and correspond to it. We tend to believe, for example, that a score of a Beethoven piano sonata should represent a performance of that sonata. Film, considered as music notation, proves that a non-correspondence between the visible and the audible is as valid as a correspondence, and that the so-called "correct interpretation" of scores is simply one option among many, and not necessarily the most interesting.
In an earlier lecture, Yoni argued that the invention of acoustic media allowed music notation to take on a more flexible role. Acoustic media–the phonograph and the tape recorder–broke music notation's monopoly on compositional documentation. Composers in the fifties, most notably Earle Brown, freed the score from its traditional responsibilities and reframed it as an art object. Earle Brown's work exposed an audiovisual problem: a problem of the relationship between the visual impression of the score, and the music that relates to it.
The problem of the audiovisual, however, was in place long before "December 1952" thrust it into the compositional spotlight. In this lecture, I cannot do justice to the long history of audiovisual media that involves theater, opera, light shows, and color organs. If I set these aside to focus on film and film alone, it is to supplement Yoni's argument: although the phonograph and the tape recorder threw the necessity of musical visibility into question, film reinvigorated musical visibility in general, reaffirming the traditional relationships between music and image and exploring new ones.
Oskar Fischinger
Oskar's first love was music. He took violin lessons, and when he finished school in April 1914, he apprenticed himself to a local organ-building firm, where he could learn more about the theoretical physics of music. In less than a year, however, both of the owners of the organ-manufacturing company were drafted for service in the war, which had begun in August, so the business closed down. Oskar then turned to his second love, the graphic arts, and in March 1915 singed on as a draftsman in the office of Eduard Göfert, the city architect of Gelnhausen, where he used the sketching skills he had learned at school and on his "nature tours" to render images of building–and acquired the new skills of precision technical drawing for blueprints. (Möitz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, 3)
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