Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music

4. Graphic Notation

4 graphic notation The King of Denmark Does anybody know why a piece of music would be called The King of Denmark? You would have to know something about the history of World War II. When the Nazis invaded Denmark they made all the Jewish people wear a yellow star on their sleeves. In protest, the King of Denmark wore a yellow star every time he went out in public. He was protesting the Nazi treatment of the Jews. So, in 1964, Morton Feldman, an American Jew, wrote a work called The King of Denmark. It’s for one musician playing a battery of percussion instruments. In the early Sixties composers discovered that noisy, non-pitched instruments, such as cymbals, gongs, pieces of wood, anything that makes noise, could constitute a fruitful and exciting sound palette to explore. There were a whole slew of solo percussion pieces. Usually they were written for everything but the kitchen sink. (Sometime the kitchen sink, too.) The more sounds the better. (Recently composer-percussionist Stuart Saunders Smith advocated writing works for only one percussion instrument and programming concerts for ensembles of two or three instruments, much the same as chamber music concerts. He coined the phrase, “percussion ecology.”) German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zyklus (Cycles) is a germinal work in this genre. The performer is surrounded by a large battery of instruments, represented by a circular score. The player may start anywhere on the circle and move around from right to left or left to right, from instrument to instrument. It’s a wonderful piece. 24 : m u s i c 1 0 9 Most of these solo percussion pieces were loud and sounded a bit like electronic music. But in The King of Denmark Morton Feldman , lo and behold, asked the player to play with his fingertips, hands, and any part of the arm. You can’t make a lot of noise by hitting a cymbal with your fingertips. Virtually every piece that Feldman wrote in thirty-five years was to be played pianissimo. His sound world was a quiet one. Why? Feldman had very poor eyesight; he was practically blind. He wore extremely thick eyeglasses and in order to see something up close, he had to remove his eyeglasses and squint. He had to use one hand to squeeze his eye into a certain position. When we would go out to Chinese restaurants with him in New York, he would always take us to brightly lit places. I think that Feldman’s poor eyesight had something to do with his penchant for quiet sounds. I can’t be sure. He had to look closely at things. He had to listen closely to sounds. Let me tell a story about Tong Kin-woon, a ch’in player who was at Wesleyan several years ago. The ch’in is an ancient Chinese zither with silk strings. It makes lovely, quiet sounds. During the Ming Dynasty, it was played by scholars, gentlemen, and philosophers. Mr. Tong told me that they would not necessarily play for someone else. They would simply sit and play, meditating, not entertaining anybody. He explained that they might stop playing , too, and imagine the music going on. What a beautiful idea! The actual sounds exist in your mind. It puts a different focus on the music. Since the strings are made of silk, the sound is almost inaudible. Once Tong presented a lecture-demonstration in the World Music Hall, a small space specially made for acoustic music. He was playing beautifully, but had amplified the instrument through a cheap sound system. The sound of silk strings through tinny loudspeakers sounded awful. Between pieces I asked him if he wouldn’t mind playing the next piece unamplified; I wanted to hear the ch’in, if only once in my life, in its pristine state. I wanted Example of the score of Morton Feldman’s King of Denmark. Copyright 1964 by C. F. Peters Corporation. Used by permission. 26 : m u s i c 1 0 9 to hear it the way it sounded during the Ming Dynasty. He replied that we wouldn’t be able to hear it. I asked him what would be so wrong with not hearing one piece of music among thousands one listens to in a lifetime. We constantly hear music we don’t want to hear, in elevators, bookstores, supermarkets, on airplanes before takeoffs. I...