When listening to Cathy Berberian’s Stripsody a few years ago during a college class, I recall looking into my classmates’ eyes trying our hardest to repress our laughter. It felt like a joke, being made to listen to this shrieking a week before our theory exam. Reading the score was another story- I didn’t understand how it could be read or for what reason it had been created.

Having been studying sound art, I realised what this was, was a graphic score. Graphic scores are a great tool for expressing ideas that cannot be expressed through traditional music notation. They also serve as a physical art form of the sound piece which it was written for, meaning it can be preserved other than in memory. Graphic scores are also a useful tool for improvisation. One of my strongest sound related beliefs is that anyone has the capability to make music, and graphic scores can help to fulfil that belief.

So, when in lecture we were shown Cathy Berberian’s Stripsody in seminar, I thought I’d see it with a different perspective to a few years ago.

I, however, did not.

I had to question myself- what made traditional music notation so much more palatable than graphic scores? After all, they’re not so different; both of them use symbols to convey musical ideas. I pinpointed where my issue with graphic scores lay, and that was that there is no common language to help ground a consensus of what is about to be played. If I were to then view music notation, traditional or graphic scores, as language, it might help me to better understand the benefit of using a graphic score.

“No other natural communication system is like human language” (Ray Jackendoff). The origin of language and how it initially developed is something that is still being pieced together by science. In Ray Jackndeoff’s FAQ, How Did Language Begin?, gives an explanation of how the origins of language would be studied, and what current research there is- exploring ideas around evolution. Jackendoff’s own observation on protolanguage resonated with me; toddlers and those learning a new language find ways to communicate, creating their own common language, much like pidgin languages, which “are learned as second languages in order to facilitate communication”. Humans somehow find commonality in phrases, using expression cues and gestures to identify meaning.

So, how do I apply this new understanding to graphic scores? My foremost thought would be to differentiate the uses of each one, like how pidgin languages are used secondarily, and therefore don’t convey everything possible within human expression. It could then be said that graphic scores aren’t necessarily useful for conveying full and complex musical ideas, but rather for gaining a general consensus of what the sound should be to those playing the score. With this in mind, I am going to challenge myself to create and use a graphic score to initially create my sound piece for this unit. I am going to use George Crumb’s The Magic Circle of Infinity as inspiration, as it still uses traditional music notation. This means that I can start to get comfortable with creating graphic scores by keeping it to my current understanding, then in future I will be able to create more abstract scores.