For this week's lectures with Candice Hopkins, we wanted to talk about scores and notation systems. So, what exactly is a score, Candice? It's a good question. So, a score can take many forms. One well-known example within art is the idea of a text score. And this is a really useful kind of score particularly for people who may not have a background in music. One of the best known compilations of text scores is a little book, a little yellow book by Yoko Ono called Grapefruit. And in it, some are very short and they almost read like poems, and many of those scores are things that you can actually complete in your head. So, you read them and for example, there is an instruction and one might be to cut a square of canvas, put it underneath a faucet that's dripping water. And over time, that canvas starts to be transformed by the water. And so the score itself really is that instruction. So, in many ways what a score enables is a set of instructions for a different set of actions. You could almost consider it to be a recipe for example. However, scores incorporate different kinds of languages, one of those languages is notation. So what is notation? Notation is a word that's used to describe a kind of set of writing. In the medieval times, was the first instance of the use of what we consider now to be Western classical notation, and we recognize this now as the language of Western music. So you see different notes that are placed within different lines and those notes indicate pitch, rhythm, tempo as well as time. And so for those people who understand how to read Western classical notation, there is an agreed upon understanding of what each of these notes means, how it's interpreted by musicians. And in the 1950s, a group of composers including Stockhausen, John Cage, really decided to break with the system of Western classical notation. Part of the reason they decided to break with it is because they started using non-traditional instruments. So, how do you create a score for an instrument if it's not a violin for example if it sounds different? And they were realizing as well that the framework of Western classical notation could be very confining. So they wanted to break from those confinements. One of my favorite examples of John Cage's score is a series of cut pieces of papers, some are circles, some are triangles, some might be rectangles. And what he does is just spill them onto the floor, and when those are spilled onto the floor a group of musicians surrounds them and decides on the spot how they're going to interpret that score. So it's different every time. However, these examples of different forms of notation of course extend beyond Western classical notation, they go far, much farther back in time. And so we'll be able to give some of those examples as well in a bit more depth through this series too. And in fact, John Cage himself added that this fantastic book that we highly recommend you research literally called notations where he compiled the methods of notation of so many of these composers who broke with classical notation systems. So, when you actually look at many of these scores you find in that book from those composers, they look much more like diagrams and maps, right? Than they would like a pentagram. This also begs the question is, why that sound need more than the written language to exist in a physical form that is not sound itself? Exactly. So, this is where we can think about ideas of memory and repetition and also consider how different cultures, particularly those who were purely oral cultures. What was a notation for them, what was a score for them. And with that, this idea of notation also kind of carries very far back in time. So, just to list a couple of examples of different kinds of notation. Between 2500 and 3600 years ago, there are examples of cast bronze bells, in places in China, as well as Korea. And what's really important about those bells, is that there was already a very advanced understanding of what sound they would make. And they're considered one of the earliest examples of polyphonic instruments and so often, they have two marks on each of the bells, and that indicates where they're meant to be hit. And when people realized that, scholars working today, they realize that this idea of notation is in fact much further extended beyond Western musical notation. And another really early example as well is in recent Delfi. If you go to Delfi, even now, inscribed in the rocks are of course words, really Greek writing systems and all those writing systems on the songs, they have marks above some of the letters to indicate how exactly they were going to sound. And so, I think one aspect of notation is to be very precise about what sounds you were trying to produce, and with that I think, the development of a language that's outside of a textual language for describing sound as well. Yeah, and so in a sense it took western culture many centuries to realize that it was only in music, or mostly in music that they realize the written language had incredible limitations, right? Or were in so many other aspects of life. The West relied on written language as the predominant form of communication and memory making. Whereas in many other civilizations, these other methods have been practiced throughout Millenia. There's two really important books that to us are worth bringing up in these topics. One is by Diana Taylor, and it's called The archive and the Repertoire. And to put it very briefly, in this book, Taylor argues that for many groups, often it is precisely the groups without power, whether it is colonized civilizations, or cultures, or women, or minorities. There are people who don't have access to the archive, they can't control the archive, and that often means the written word that gets collected and preserved, right? But what they have is the repertoire. They have this, what some people would consider oral culture. But oral, it still, it puts it too much into the aspect of speaking. For her, the repertoire is gestural. It's like when your grandparents taught something to your parents through imitation, through gesture, and you learn it that way, right? And so she's very interested in this book and in seeing the relationship between these archives and repertoire, right? Another fantastic book too, if you're interested in these topics, it's called Writing Without Words. And it's a compilation of essays by Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo, looking at different methods of none written language from Miss America and the Andes, that have existed for centuries and are still used to this date, or have influenced even how we'd think about computers for example. Most obvious examples are like the khipus, these systems of knots through within which Inca civilizations used to record entire histories. And personal memories as well as cultural memories. But there are so many great examples in that book. Yeah there's many and then other examples are, we are really interested with this section and thinking about how scores can be inscribed on many different things. They can be in a way inscribed in your body through different motions and gestures. They can also be inscribed in the land. One of the most well-known examples comes from Australia, it's something that many people can consider or call in English to be the song lines and that those are a way of kind of mapping or cartography of the land down through song, dance and memory. So, when you go to a different site in the land often there are some inscriptions done called petroglyphs. And those petroglyphs contain very precise information about that place. The ideology of that place, what it's used for, what it's economies were, what the labor practices were. And this also was in the Americas, throughout the Americas. And it was a way of passing down knowledge. So, for a Klingon people which, who live in Alaska and Northern Canada and Yukon, if you go to these certain places often where there's rocks, you'd sing a song and that song helps guide you through that place and it also acts as an archive, a performed archive or living archive. Right. So in a sense the landscape itself becomes the score, right in the memory. Precisely. The form of the memory. To end this section, we thought we'd bring up these great series of projects by Charles Gaines. He's a great conceptual artist, a professor at Cal Arts, very influential to several generations right now. But he has these theories that kind of fit in perfectly with what we're discussing, which is the Manifesto Series. And in this, it's a series of drawings but also it leads to performances. What he, he's taken four really important manifestos from radical movements in the 20th century like the Black Panthers, the suffragettes. And he has transcribed the manifestos into musical scores so they can be performed as some sort of anthem of the revolution. And so again, we have this transcription process from the- we have just written to the sonification, to the musical experience. So, we hope you can check them out. So this brings forward a good example. Using Charles Gaines as a start to move a little farther back in time. One example of someone we want to bring forward is Anna Halprin. Anna Halprin was really a pioneer of modern dance. She lives and works in San Francisco, and she collaborated a lot with her architect husband Lawrence Halprin. And she was interested in how a score could be a score not just for sound, but in fact for action, for choreography. So she was working with different dancers, she even collaborated with people like John Cage as well, Yvonne Rainer. But for her, dance offered the potential for even physical healing. So when she first started creating these choreographies, these scores that she would draw out often in very bright colors. She was thinking about how these could influence the body, but also have even a broader political dimension. And so, they were responding with the choreography called Planetary dance for example to the Vietnam war. So, to a great social change within society and they were critical of that, but they were critical of that in a very different way than other activists were. So with Anna Halprin, she was also interested in how then these scores could create this dimension of how bodies move through space and time, which is also a very important dimension within music as well. So music is the playing of sound notation over time. And with that, she was also interested in the idea of ritual. And so that brings us I think to a very much more broad example of an artist who's using score too. And that is the late Kwakwaka'wakw chief, Beau Dick, who was living and working in the north west coast of Canada. And throughout his entire life, he was carving these masks. And these masks have been carved for thousands of years. And the important thing about them is they are in a way the performance of the strength of an oral culture. So every single one of these mass has its own song, and has its own ceremony, and it has its own choreography related to that. So, I think what part of our challenge to you is to think about scores not only as textual notation, not only as classical music notation, but also scores in the form of objects. How can objects enable a kind of action to take place?
