New Notational Strategies for New Interpretative Paradigms: Revisiting the Scores of Anestis Logothetis (1921-1994)

Abstract

NEW NOTATIONAL STRATEGIES FOR NEW INTERPRETATIVE PARADIGMS: REVISITING THE SCORES OF ANESTIS LOGOTHETIS (1921–1994) MICHAEL MCINERNEY 1. INTRODUCTION HE SUBJECT OF NOTATION never quite goes away. With the continued encroaching of technology into musical life, the slippage between sound and score becomes if anything a more pressing issue. Extended sound resources, post-production editing and dissemination, and new ways of preserving work-identity through recording all conspire to drive the field of notation and the community of interpreting performers further apart. Radical solutions are possible. Interpretative practice in the wake of technology might be considered akin to geometry after Riemann, as a set of axioms that must be logically non-contradicting in order to sustain meaning, but a number of which may be inverted to produce alternative, equally non-contradicting, axiomatic universes that are also plausible. T 100 Perspectives of New Music One such radical aesthetic can be discerned through the many ‘graphic’ scores of the Viennese composer Anestis Logothetis (1921– 1994). In its distinctive resolution of some of the dilemmas of noise, notation, and technology, his oeuvre may be more relevant to performers of our time than it was to his contemporaries in the latter part of the twentieth century. Between 1959 and 1994 he worked consistently within a notational system of his own devising to create a body of work that reflects a distinctive approach to interpretation: not only to what musical signs represent, but also to how the reading of them to performance might be carried out, and what that might mean for composer, performer, and engaged listener. In order to present this interpretative aesthetic in a clear light, this paper attempts to set up a comparative review of interpretative aesthetics from three current musical practices: jazz, rock, and the concert hall tradition. The review concentrates on musical praxis—the activity of rehearsal and performance and how this reflects core values about (in this case) the relationships between performers, composers, the work, and the event of performance. It depends on a number of principles both aesthetic and pragmatic that appear consistently across the genres but each time in a differently ordered, logically consistent set. Taking the results of this analysis into the world of Logothetis reveals that his oeuvre can be seen to represent a fourth distinctive yet equally consistent reading of the same principles. There is something inevitably reductive about such a comparative analysis. In this article, the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue (Davis 1959) and U2’s Achtung Baby (U2 1991) have been used as exemplars of jazz and rock interpretative practice, respectively. This is not to say that each album can stand as a complete metonym for its generic context, but in each case the background and rehearsal process has received a close analysis from which I have been able to impute an interpretative methodology that seems reasonably representative. As no more than the third premise of a comparative review, I hope that the analytical quote from Roman Ingarden below can act as a sufficient representative of essential concert values: The composer fashions his work in a creative effort, over a certain period of time. This labour fashions something . . . that previously did not exist but from the moment of its coming into being does somehow exist quite independently of whether anyone performs it, listens to it, or takes any interest in it whatever. The musical work does not form any part of mental existence, and in particular, no part of the conscious experiences of its creator. . . . Moreover . . . New Notational Strategies for New Interpretative Paradigms 101 [it] is not identified with its various performances. Despite this difference, the performances resemble the particular work, and the more they resemble it the “better” they are. Finally, the work is totally different from its score. It is . . . a sounding work, while the notation of the score is simply a defined arrangement, usually of graphic signs. (Ingarden 1986, 2) The three analyses that follow explore the interpretative practice of each genre on the basis of the six principles identified in Example 1 below. These analyses can be thought to occupy a common vector space whose six basis vectors can be identified with the six given principles. The...