6- Graphic Scores

The Task

Compose a piece of music from the painting given.  Piece given: Richard Paul Lohse Progressive Reduktion


Research

Richard Paul Lohse (13th September 1902 - 16th September 1988) was a Swiss artist best know for his concrete art.  The art work to be used as a graphic score is Progressive Reduktion.  This piece was created in 1942 and gives a very secular, serial type image.  


Graphic Scores is a type of music notation outside the realm of classical scoring.  It uses symbols and graphics in order to convey the desired effect.  It evolved circa 1950's and is often used by experimental composers as sometimes classical scores can be ineffective.   Composers who are known to use them include Avant-Garde composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti.  

Graphic scores can include anything from  symbols, dots, lines, arrows, circles and many other patterns and shapes.  An example of this is Ligeti's Artikulation and Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet.
 [Ligeti's Artikulation]

[Stockhausen Helicopter String Quartet]

As the music became more and more experimental and so far away from the classical groundings it had come from, the musical notation style needed to emerge and develop just like the music.  This is why composers had a need for graphic scores.  How could one score the piece of musique concrete they had just created based on the sounds of metals being hit if they were confined to use classical notation?  It would be impossible.

                 Scores became more like maps of a sound world, charts for sonic navigation at a time when                    for a sizeable contingent of composers melody was not mentioned and tune a distinctly taboo                  word. (Phillips 2013)


The Composition

The idea behind the piece is the idea of the colours each having their own "theme" which lasts according to the amount of that specific colour in the artwork.  The colours look like they are dripping down the page and so the themes had to have the feeling of falling too.  The themes all have their own instrumentation to build a texture, while still being coherent, as the graphic has the sense of texture but coherence.

The "themes" were created in Cubase using the MIDI sampler.  Once these themes were created the MIDI was exported and imported into Logic Pro where the sounds were changed using the synthesizer Massive.  The whole piece was then mixed and exported.






Critical Analysis

While the sense of coherence and the idea of falling have been realised, the style of the composition doesn't seem to work with the graphic as much as anticipated.  Alternative ideas included a serial piece and a piece made using specific samples which corresponded to a certain colour which may have worked better in regards to the artwork.  Despite this, the choice of instrumentation gave the composition the overall feeling of belonging and space.

References

Phillips, T. (2013) 'Playing Pictures: the Wonder of Graphic Scores' from The Guardian in http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/07/graphic-music-scores-playing-pictures-tom-phillips [22.4.14]