Earl BROWN: Folio (1952/53)

Описание: Program Notes

“Time is the actual dimension in which music exists when performed and is by nature an infinitely divisible continuum. No metric system or notation based on metrics is able to indicate all of the possible points in the continuum, yet sound may begin or end anywhere along this dimension.”

Similarly, all of the other characteristics of a sound — frequency, intensity, timbre, modes of attack-continuation-decay — are infinitely divisible continua and unmeasurable. The imposition of approximate scalar-systems is obviously possible and efficacious, but to deal directly with the experience of a continuum on its own unknown terms seems to imply that the unmeasuring eye and ear are their own terms and experiential justification and compatible with unmeasured experience. An ambiguous but implicitly inclusive graphic “notation,” and alert, sympathetic performers, are conceivable catalysts for activating this “process” within continua.

…to produce graphic situations, the implications of which would involve the performer’s response as a factor leading to multiple “characteristic” realizations of the piece as an audible event;…to extend and intensify the ambiguity inherent in any graphic representation and possible composer, performer, and audience response to it; a work, and any one performance of it, as “process” rather than as static and conclusive.

Two basic approaches:

a “mobile” score subject to physical manipulation of its components, resulting in an unknown number of different, integral, and “valid” realizations.
a conceptually “mobile” approach to basically fixed graphic elements; subject to an infinite number of performance realizations through the involvement of the performer’s immediate responses to the intentionally ambiguous graphic stimuli relative to the conditions of performance involvement.