Pre-form topology

There is a nice text of Cornellius Cardew about notation and interpretation where he says that what makes a score different of a drawing is the relation that is established there between the space (the paper) and the time (the form). That's why in the score there is a condition of readability, rules that set at least the relationship between the page and the form so that the score is no longer a drawing¹.

A posible orientation of notation is to establish with it the musical form. In the same text Cardew notes the following common idea: the composers works with sounds. But the things that are written in paper are not sounds. Earle Brown would say that too². There is a whole scheme of steps (a "production chain") that gives place to form. Anyway, in certain practice it is intended to determine form with notation.

Indetermination is other way. The same idea of something indeterminate in the score says something about the relationship between notation and sounds. If the score must be submitted to a process to get to sound, a process where information passes from one state to another (paper, player, action, sound), ¿what is the limit of the determinable? If the score is only part of the work, ¿how can it pretend to determinate it all?

So: form in music is what you hear, just as you see the shape of an object. Everything that sounds in the piece is form and the perception of this form gives us something like the identity of the piece (another concept shared between Cardew and Brown). The question now is ¿what is written?. Not only a series of steps or possibilites for interpretation. There is a pre-form, something that is there before time is put into play.

To understand this I use the concept of topological figure. A topological figure doesn't stop beeing it when you apply continuous transformation to it (for example, if you strech it, shrink it or twist it). A square or a rectangle are topologicaly equivalent, even through they're visibly different from each other. A topological figure becomes another when you aply to it a cut or when two or more points of the figure are joined. A square is topologicaly different form a cylinder (a square with two parallel sides joined).

The pre-form I mentioned earlier has topological characteristics. In this state, the piece has potentialy infinite forms, one for each possible interpretation. Doesn't matter how specifficaly written it is. There is an interview to Antoine Beuger where he mentions Leibniz to say that in nature (let's say, in facts) no two leaves are alike³. Same can be said about interpretations. The score is not the form because it has no place in the facts, no place in time. Only through interpretation a from can be extracted from it, by means of processes in which always something is lost and something (or everything, at last) is added. Two forms can come out from the same score and this is a central fact of indetermination.

¹ Cardew, C. Notation-interpretation. Tempo, Nueva Serie, No. 58 (verano de 1961), pp. 21-33
²  Brown, E. The notation and performance of new music. The Musical Quarterly Vol. 72, No. 2 (1986), pp. 180-201
³  Saunders, J. Antoine Beuger. The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. pp. 231–241. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Extraído de http://www.james-saunders.com/interview-with-antoine-beuger/

Form in fact and latent form

En español aquí

Some silences are made, of each one sitting there, in the ground, in some couch around. Some silences and only a long, dying breath from the air conditioner, oblivious to us all. The street outside and soon the passing busses, announcing themselves or stopping at trafic lights making the windows shake; thus the atention is sharpened. The musicians look at the ground. I'm with them, behind at left. With my first gesture they look at me. I breathe. With my second gesture the music begins. But there is nothing that excludes the busses, the air conditioning or the steps of latecomers, looking to settle into the small room. There is nothing in this music letting you release those silences without feeling that a catastrophe would occur.

If is there a question about how music "transforms" time, there should be a question about how music "transforms" space. Is form "habitable"?

I'm interested in course untied of discourse. When the elements of the narrative loose the tension that keeps them tied: you can't tell when "B comes after A" because is difficult to tell what A and B are, what are their differences. The atention "flotes", is no longer "directed"; the form elapses but it also sourround us.

Thinking the form here is to think in this unmeasurable force, in the fact or event simultaneously invoking every listener and going through each one individualy. It implies not only the work sounding but also the space and the actions in it, the memories and the spectations. Multiplicity leaking.

From this perspective, composing is not a direct operation on sound. After all you can only speculate about it: it's impossible to foresee every contingency. Even more if you deal with notation. As Earle Brown says: music writing is finite, sound syntax is infinite. On what the composer operates? Saying that the only thing that he does is speculate on what will happen, via more or less control in notation or in the arranging of materials is insufficient.

From here, thinking in composing becomes more abstract. What we can say up to this point is that composing is timeless; that form substantially passes and because of that the composition doesn't operate directly over it. Then, even if composing involves organizing elements, this organization isn't "in time". In any case the time is divided for the composer in a) another parameter (duration) and b) that on which the form "unfolds". It's interesting to stop at this point, because it may be the key to understand this issue. I'm thinking in a "folded form", a form without time. What remains: only the relations established between the elements of the piece. Notation is the codification of this structure. It remains to be seen what features it has.