After the trauma of the Second World War, Western music set out to reinvent itself by questioning the rules inherited from the past. In this context, the question of writing became a central issue. Some developments were aimed at absolute control by the composer, and ever greater codification (whether of the score, instrumental interplay or even the microstructure of sounds). Others, on the contrary, open up to the freedom of the performers, to a greater or lesser extent, by various means. The confrontation of art music with new technologies, jazz, pop music and world music continues to revive this question to this day.

"Everything flows from writing" was the first sentence I wrote in 2012 to introduce the three volumes I was to devote to twentieth-century Western art music(Musiques savantes,Le mot et le reste, 2012, 2015, 2017). Indeed, from the 9th century onwards, writing has been the formidable springboard that has enabled music to take on a forward-looking attitude: unlike oral tradition, which preserves what must be preserved through centuries of repetition, writing fixes things immediately, albeit imperfectly, and the page can be turned. What's more, writing goes beyond its primary mission of fixing memory to become a powerful creative tool. There are, of course, learned oral musical cultures, for example in North and South India, Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and the Arabo-Andalusian traditions. They are radically different from Western art music in their construction and distribution. The writing allows for the development of refined polyphony, imitations between voices, recalls, mirrors, inversions, palindromes, complex structures, the use of mathematics, gematria (a form of religious numerology), symbolisms, figuralisms, the rich development of themes, the complexity of orchestration and arrangements, etc. It's an infinite territory of exploration, as demonstrated by experiments that are constantly being renewed, right up to the present day. To name but a few: spectral music, which, from the 1970s onwards, applied the acoustic models of sounds analyzed by spectrogram, then by computer, to scores, to create instrumental sound synthesis (Gérard Grisey), for example, or to ensure seamless transitions between clear and noisy sound masses, replacing consonance-dissonance breathing(Kaija Saariaho); the hyper-complexification and virtuosity of playing (Brian Ferneyhough); the codification of an unheard-of sound palette, a veritable "instrumental musique concrète"(Helmut Lachenmann); the application of the fractal mathematics model to musical structuring(Alberto Posadas, Enno Poppe...), etc.

Registration changes the game

The evolution of recording, which appeared at the end of the 19th century, is strictly identical to that of writing. Its primary mission was to fix memories, particularly of music: the performance, the concert, the piece. A few decades later, we begin to create with this new tool, which was not invented for this purpose. This happens before a record is released, in terms of the aesthetics of sound recording and post-production work, which brings out unheard-of sonorities and details impossible to reproduce in concert, in rock, jazz and classical music alike, but also in field recording. Recording also enabled the creation of new music based on mixing, editing and variation techniques. This revolution marks the most obvious and radical rethinking of the score in scholarly music.

In 1948, when Pierre Schaeffer invented musique concrète in the studios of the Radiodiffusion française, he claimed to be working on "concrete" sound from one end of his music's conception to the other: sound production, capture (recording), processing, editing, mixing, composition (only at the end of the chain does an element of abstraction appear). This approach contrasts with the abstraction of writing, which starts from a composer's imagination, goes through the writing process and only produces sound at the end of the process, when the score is given to a performer to play. In the sixties, Pierre Schaeffer wrote a solfeggio of the sound object(Traité des objets musicaux, 1966).

Recording has enabled the gradual creation of a gigantic global sound library that puts all music on the same level (a single gesture can be used to listen to an infinite number of different types of music, out of context) and encourages an unprecedented cross-fertilization of cultures. Beatriz Ferreyra offers a poignant demonstration of the benefits of recording with Echos, composed in 1978 from the fixed voice of her niece, Mercedes Cornu, who died in a motorcycle accident. Four years earlier, she had come to visit the Argentinian composer, who had lived in France since the early 1960s. Her wish was to become a singer, and Ferreyra had recorded four traditional songs. As a tribute, her composition draws on this corpus without ever playing complete melodies, only snatches, bits of chopped-up phrases, sometimes cut off in mid-flight, or sublimated in resonance effects. It's a reflection on memory, remembrance and trace, a perfect illustration of the challenges of recording. At the end of the piece, a single whole sentence emerges, followed by a laugh: a last memory. This highly elaborate construction is based solely on sound, listening and the manipulation of tapes, which take the place of the score.
The shock of Pierre Schaeffer's radical rethinking of compositional gestures can be gauged by the fact that Karlheinz Stockhausen, after an essay he wrote in 1952 in Schaeffer's studios (theÉtude concrète known as "aux mille collants"), described the work of musique concrète as "miserable bricolages ".

John Cage, randomness and happening

American John Cage shook up the world of music with his original vision of the use of chance and randomness in his works. He began experimenting in the 1930s (Imaginary Lanscape n° 11939), but it was above all his travels in Europe in the 1950s, notably to Darmstadt, that helped spread his ideas, as well as the musical happenings he organized in the United States. This desire for non-control lies at the heart of his work, in which chance and indeterminacy can take their place in the compositional principle (use of writing techniques based on the Yi-King, the Chinese divinatory art, or any other method of randomly choosing musical values: dice games, etc.); in performance (random works driven by the musicians' choices, freely interpretable graphic scores, various games, simultaneous superimpositions of different music, etc.); and in interaction with the audience (the birth of the musical happening with Untitled Event in 1952, followed by numerous other performances, such as 4'33'' the same year, Theater Piece in 1960 or 4'33'' n° 2 - 0'00'' in 1962). For John Cage, chance allows the performer - and even the audience - to regain their freedom and place in the face of the dictatorship of the composer. The whole process of musical interpretation is already subject to chance (the ambience of the room, outside noises, the performers' playing...). Cage says he is merely accentuating the phenomenon.

4'33 (1952) does feature a score, written in three movements, each consisting of a carefully timed " Tacet ". Cage invites listeners to listen to their environment, and to question what music can be. According to him, "everything is music", and the listener is invited to become aware of this in this work. Cage creates situations in which music can emerge and be heard.

Literature, too, takes the path of chance, with the cut-up technique pioneered by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Umberto Eco theorized this trend in his 1962 essay L'Œuvre ouverte : "The open work becomes an epistemological metaphor. [The author offers the performer a work to be completed. The idea of the artist-creator as omnipotent demiurge, sole master of the meaning of his work in the face of an awaiting humanity whose savior he makes himself out to be, a romantic vision if ever there was one, is thus abandoned. As a result of numerous artistic changes since the beginning of the 20th century, both the performer and the listener have been invited to participate in the work. The meaning of a work is never given or definitively fixed: it is constantly evolving, constructed in real time.

Cage's posterity

Few composers remained indifferent to Cage's proposals. Around him, many adopted graphic scores that left a considerable amount of creative freedom to the performer: Earle Brown, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman. This is known as the "New York School" (which blends dance and the visual arts). Cage 's influence can even be felt in some of Pierre Boulez's works, even though he was committed to absolute control through writing(Pli selon pli, 1957-1962, Domaines, 1968), which leave a limited amount of freedom to the performers. Many composers continued along the path of graphic scores, happenings and performances in the 1960s, the decade that dared to do everything: first and foremost Fluxus, a movement whose adventure lasted some twenty years, initiated in 1960 by George Maciunas with, among others, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, Joseph Beuys, Charlotte Moorman, Robert Filliou, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Henry Flynt and the painter Ben (Ben Vautier). To give an idea of the freedom that reigns here, for performers and audiences alike, here are a few examples of La Monte Young's Compositions, happenings/performances given in Yoko Ono's loft in 1960:

" Composition no. 1 for piano - for David Tudor: Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water to the stage, so that the piano can eat and drink. The performer has the choice of feeding the piano himself or letting it feed itself. In the first case, the performance is over once the piano has been fed. In the second case, the performance is finished after the piano has fed itself or refused to do so. "
" Composition 1960 no. 5: Release a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) into the concert hall. When the composition is finished, take care to let the butterfly fly outside. The composition can be of any length, but if unlimited time is available, doors and windows can be opened before the butterfly is released, and the composition can be considered complete when the butterfly flies out. "
" Composition 1960 no. 10 - for Bob Morris: Draw a straight line and follow it."

Graphic scores have been adopted by many artists, including George Crumb, Mauricio Kagel, Krzysztof Penderecki, André Boucourechliev, Luciano Berio, Dieter Schnebel, Sylvano Bussotti, Costin Miereanu and Cornelius Cardew. Depending on the work, performers are given varying degrees of freedom. They may be based on choices to be made during the reading, whether voluntary or random (for example, playing where the eye falls on the score, with indications of speed, nuance and timbre read out at the end of the last sequence performed, in the Klavierstück XI by Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1956), or on improvised passages with more or less precise instructions.

It was Karlheinz Stockhausen, under the influence of free jazz, who probably went furthest in writing about freedom with Aus den sieben Tagen ("Seven Days", May 1968), whose musical instructions are based on just a few phrases. This meditative work inaugurates what he calls "intuitive music". He invites participants to fast and meditate alone before playing the fifteen pieces. One of them, Unbegrenzt ("Unlimited"), states: "Play a sound with the certainty that you have all the time and space you need." Another, Es ("It"), suggests: "Think nothing. Wait until it's completely silent inside you. When you've reached that point, start playing. As soon as you start thinking again, stop. Try to get back to the state of not thinking , and then continue playing."

Passing musicians

The first recording of Aus den sieben Tagen features clarinettist Michel Portal, also a jazz and free jazz musician. It's important to note these profiles of musicians who are curious, jacks-of-all-trades, open to different proposals and themselves passers-by, musicians of the written and spoken word, of theater, happening and performance. This is also the case of double bassist Joëlle Léandre, who opened up to improvisation in the 1970s, while continuing to play numerous written pieces to this day, and who herself composes, notably graphic scores. Then there's New Yorker John Zorn and the rules of composition/improvisation he introduced in the 1980s, based on cards or index cards with more or less precise, often poetic indications, a consensus between score and improvised performance. These profiles are becoming increasingly common today, as in the case of French musicians such as Élise Dabrowski and Claudine Simon, or composers/instrumentalists such as Benjamin de la Fuente and Samuel Sighicelli. All four have been trained in classical score reading as well as improvisation.

Open work and musical theater

"In short, the author offers the performer a work to complete. He doesn't know in what precise way it will be realized, but he knows that it will remain his work; at the end of the interpretative dialogue, a form organized by another will take shape, but a form of which he remains the author. His role is to propose possibilities that are already rational, oriented and endowed with certain organic requirements that determine their development." So says Umberto Eco in L'Œuvre ouverte, already mentioned. A friend of the extraordinary singer Cathy Berberian, he shares her interest incomic strips. This led to Stripsody, which she composed and performed in 1966, based on a graphic score drawn by Roberto Zamarin, depicting short narrative sequences in comic strip form (the name combines Strip and Rapsody). The work also draws on musical theater, giving the singer a decisive role as actress.

Musical theater, also initiated in the 1950s, saw its heyday in the following decade with John Cage(Variations II, 1961), György Ligeti (Adventures, 1963, New Adventures1965), Mauricio Kagel (Match, 1964, Acustica1970) and Luciano Berio (Laborintus II1965), who in some of their works invited the performer to be an actor, following indications in the score. The adventure continued in the 1970s, for example with the founding in Paris in 1972 of the Compagnie de théâtre musical des Ulis, with composer Michel Puig and actors Michaël Lonsdale, Catherine Dasté and Edith Scob, and right up to the present day, notably with Georges Aperghis and Vinko Globokar, and even closer to home with Olga Neuwirth and Samuel Sighicelli. Musical theater doesn't necessarily leave the world of the score, and can, on the contrary, make it even denser.

Musiques savantes de transmission orale

Some composers base their entire practice, their works and eventually their performances on an entirely oral transmission. Such is the case with the American composer, singer, director, screenwriter, actress, dancer and choreographer Meredith Monk and her troupe. Her work is based on regular rehearsals and getting to know each other. It was only later, in the 2000s, when other artists wanted to take over her shows, that Monk realized how much was left unsaid and set about recording the constituent elements of her works, some of them on paper.

This is not the case forÉliane Radigue who, since the early 2000s, has been approached by numerous musicians to whom she gives oral instructions and with whom she works at length until she achieves the sound quality she desires. Her music of the infinitesimal, deeply demanding, is not notated at all, but transmitted to selected performers.

Computer-aided composition (CAD)

Computer-aided composition (CAD), which came into widespread use in the 1980s and 1990s, thanks in particular toIrcam, does not generally do away with the score, quite the contrary: it adds a whole range of additional controls, processing and triggers to the simple emission of notes and sounds, making it far more complex (effects, sound transformations, spatialization, sound triggers...).

Real time has enabled the emergence of "virtual scores": the computer is capable of triggering a number of live processes in response to a performer's playing of a score. The principle is that the computer recognizes where the musician is at and reacts, sometimes also depending on how he or she is playing. Here again, we're dealing with a kind of "super-score", however virtual it may seem. Such a virtual score is at work in Kaija Saariaho's NoaNoa (1992), where the computer responds to the playing of a flautist, who can also, more simply, depending on the hardware available, trigger reactions using pedals.

Today, however, there are controllers and interfaces that allow all kinds of gestural access to the computer, which in some cases can make the score disappear and encourage improvisational attitudes and a relationship with the body. This is the case with Karlax, for example.

When electroacoustic composers work with computers directly on audio, the graphic representation of sound becomes almost a score on the screen. This generally annoys the pioneers of the tape recorder, who claim that, by doing so, we no longer pay attention to listening, and somehow revert to a music of the abstract, determined by the screen reading, which can completely mislead about the real sound result. Beatriz Ferreyra encourages her students to close their eyes in order to work better: quite a symbol!

The pitfalls of freedom

Beyond electroacoustic music, a number of composers deeply involved in these different paths - improvisation, musical theater, aleatorics... - sometimes evoke disappointment in the face of initial utopias. Luciano Berio wrote fourteen Sequenze between 1958 and 2002, each for a solo instrument, pushed to the limit of its virtuosity and referring to its history and repertoires. The first Sequenze are inspired by musical theater. Berio, who had met John Cage and Earle Brown, introduced a degree of indeterminacy into the rhythms, pitches and registers of the first eight (he didn't put clefs on the written lines, and the staves were sometimes limited to three lines), but he abandoned this approach at the turn of the 1980s because of the excessive liberties taken by certain performers, who, in his opinion, did not follow the score scrupulously enough when reviving the works. He even rewrote some of the earlier Sequenze. 

Samuel Sighicelli, whose training and early works were strongly influenced by improvisation, shared his doubts and reversals with us. His group Caravaggio, with Bruno Chevillon, Éric Échampard and Benjamin de la Fuente, began in 2000 with a large-scale improvisation and then, from album to album, opted for composition. In an interview recently published in the book La musique en prise directeIn an interview recently published in the book La musique en prise directe, he explained: " In scores that open up to improvisation, you also have to be careful about the degree of freedom: not everyone can improvise. The freedom given in a passage, which one might imagine to be liberating for a performer, can on the contrary turn out to be blocking, destabilizing and ultimately unhelpful to the piece. It can also reveal the performer's possible frustration and generate an incongruous departure from the framework. Moreover, improvisation is in no way a freedom from a rule or a gratuitous gesture: it is a practice, an understanding, a long-term task, just like interpretation." 

Guillaume Kosmicki

Photo Des mondes construits Metz © Loïc Guénin