Images as musical scores

[mosc]

This post is inspired by Jan's post in "wave clays"

In the early 70s I was invited to a party in San Francisco attended by several jazz and avant guard improvisers. I didn't know anyone. We all brought acoustic instruments as nobody had electronic ones at that time. I showed up with a conch shell.

Anyway, the host (I'll call her Mary) projected scores on a screen and we would improvise music from "reading" the notations. At first the scores were based on conventional notation. We'd play for a few minutes with people picking up a rhythm or a few notes from the score; not too interesting. I wondered why I came to this "party".

Then the slide would change. Each successive slide was a slightly more experimental version of notation; staves made with wavy lines, blotches for notes, a few colors, etc. That stuff was in the air in those days. Each time the music would sound different, freer, better in my opinion. I started to enjoy myself.

Finally there was a score with no lines or blotches indicating notes, but colors and abstract shapes. I remember it as mostly blue colors in a mood reminiscent of a sunset. That one yielded the "best" music. We played for a long time. It was transcendental.

When Mary turned off the projector we applauded. "That was great, who was the composer?" we asked.

"That was not a composition or a musical score, but an impressionist (maybe she said expressionist) painting from the 1920s."

---

This was a revelation to me at the time. I recalled reading a few years before John Cage's book Notations, a collection of experimental music scores published in 1960. This is available for free on the Internet Archive.

When I read that book the first time I was confused; "What do these symbols mean? How do you play that?". After the party, I started to understand.

---

I'm thinking now that we could do something similar here on e-m. Here in this composition forum an image could be posted. People could post audio impressions inspired by them. Those could be mixed by members and posted,

We could do this live too, A few years ago Jan made a mixer tool for musicians connecting to e-m through streaming connections. There are some recordings of some of these called latency jams. If there is interest we could reactivate that live stream mixer.

Here's and example: https://electro-music.com/forum/topic-48406.html&highlight=latency+jam

What do you think?

[blue hell]