Score
I notated the music spatially. The reasons for this are twofold: the music is not metric and so to notate in bars seemed counterintuitive, and I was keen to create an environment in which the performers’ focus was on their relationships to one another; in which they were engaged in an active, present, and intentional listening. Timestamps are supplied initially, to give a sense of scale, however performers are encouraged to judge durations intuitively in performance. In this sense, Quartet for a Landscape’s notation refutes the traditional Werktreue notion of the score in which, I argue, music is abstracted, codified, and sonically deadened. These ideas come from Chris Cutler who traces notation’s opposition to liveness. He writes, ‘notation is an objectified, schematic form of memory, with qualities quite opposite to those of biological memory… [notation] is the first form in which music can become property… notation is a medium which encourages and reinforces a specialising division of labour between composer and performer… notation is primarily a medium of the eye not the ear’ (Cutler, 1984: 284). Returning to something of Renaissance and Baroque notational techniques, in which a great deal is left to the interpretation of the performer, the score for Quartet for a Landscape is therefore a tool to live performance rather than an object in and of itself; notation as paintbrush rather than aspic.
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