- The Line Is Fine
In 2008 I placed a piece of translucent vellum paper over the score for Bach’s Cello Suites. I then played a CD of Rostropovich performing this same score, and, while I listened, I traced the written notes as closely as I could at the same speed as the music. My piece one to one involved writing all thirty-six pages of the score in this way and videotaping the process.
Plugging myself into this circuit of simultaneous recording and playback wasn’t really very relaxing. I had a sustained sensation of failing the task at hand. Even though I was pushing my motor control to the limit there was no way I would be able to trace legibly a measure of fast notes at the actual speed that they are performed. At any given moment I was already behind, and the activity required such focus that there was no way to look ahead. The pen recorded my ear-to-hand transmissions, resulting in something of a laboratory printout.
But the pen was also an instrument that I performed; I was trying to be a musical machine. The lines were inflected by the energy of the cellist as he brought these notes to life on the recording. No doubt the man had soul, and a little of this soul found its way back into the lines, imprinting another kind of data onto the page. And there were other things being recorded in the line. My hand and fingers had been conditioned by years of playing instruments and notating music—movements previously recorded into my muscle memory and now being played back as I recorded the playback of the recording of Rostropovich playing.
In a related experiment, also in 2008, I began with a written transcription of Charlie Parker’s Steeplechase. I put a piece of tracing paper over it, but this time, instead of tracing it in time to a CD recording, I paced myself with a metronome. I found that if I set the speed on the metronome to its slowest possible setting I could trace perfectly readable notes. I then increased the speed of the metronome little by little, each time making a new tracing, until I was writing at the same tempo that Charlie Parker recorded it: a lightning fast one hundred seventy-six beats per minute. In the end there were twenty-six pages that resulted from this process that were arranged in a line, incrementally from left to right. [End Page 36]
In this piece I felt a progressive transformation where one kind of information was replaced by another. At the slower speeds the notated symbols maintain their clarity and legibility, though at about forty-two beats per minute (the sixth of the twenty-six pages) one could see where the breakdown began. Here I found a gradual disappearance of the musical code and, at the same time, a gradual emergence of the line—a line devoid of literal meaning, but that was much closer to music as it passes in time. What would seem at first to be an entropic process was in another sense a rehabilitation of something that gets lost when music is fixed onto a score.
The thing about scores is that, like any kind of plan or scheme, they are totally independent of the real-time experience they map out. The score fixes the future with discrete graphical symbols, and the performance moves in the flux of an unfolding present. It’s a question of how plans relate to actions. Plans break time into building blocks; actions break building blocks into time—totally different and even incongruous translations. I keep getting the feeling that this blockiness is becoming obsolete, and so rather than keep the plan ahead of the action, I am more interested in what happens when the action makes the plan, or when they become the same thing. I am researching a finer line that separates plans from actions, a line that loops back on itself, breaks in unexpected places, and is anything but straight. [End Page 37]
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