Eric Richards: The Composer And His Notation

ERIC RICHARDS: THE COMPOSER AND HIS NOTATION To present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made

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Iean Francois Lyotard

I use notation itselfto help the performer create and sustain sounds of a wispy and ambiguous character, rhythmically indeterminate attack, and unevenly broken up duration... I am trying to look at certain sounds from a multiple perspective... This, then, is a deliberately paradoxical endeavor: the notation and bringing into being ofthe unformed, the ambiguous, and the unfinished,.. trying to make visible the invisible.

Eric Richards Without description, without echo: the desire for the intrinsicality of a thing, which cannot come to be, unless we give something of ourselves: The Fury of a hermetic language.

Roland Barthes

Music notation is a visual representation of both musical sound and thought. The relationship between the musical idea and its notation is a reciprocal one. Musical notation is the means by which the composer projects the musical idea into time. The score is the means by which musical time is made intelligible. The musical score comprises a system of both phonic and graphic notational signs. In the true Saussurean sense, the notational sign is made up of a "signifier" (a sound-image or its graphic equivalent) and signified (the musical concept or sound-idea). In Western Music, these signs are spatially situated on an implied grid-like background-a visual corollary to the vertical (pitch) and horizontal (time) aspects of music. As a means of communication, music notation acts as both a descriptive

record of musical sound (either imagined or heard) and a prescriptive directive for' performance. As a vehicle of expression, music notation lies suspended between memory and expectation. In the chain ofmusical meaning, the notational sign functions as the point ofarrival for the composer's musical thought, and the point ofdeparture for the performer's realization of the work.

The notational sign comes to stand for both a partial presence and partial absence of sound and, by extension, musical meaning. The musical work cannot be solely represented by the score alone. The musical score can only approximate all the properties of the performance.

The structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss suggests that both music and mythology are framed by shadow:

Music and myth bring us face to face with potential objects of which only the shadows are actualized with conscious approximations (a myth and a musical score cannot be more) of inevitably unconscious truths, which follow from them.

The score can never fully encompass the multiplicity of interpretative possibilities but instead opens the way to them. The process of interpretation is set in motion by the score.

The composer Igor Stravinsky addresses the question of the identity of the musical work: No matter how scrupulously a piece of music is notated, no matter how carefully it may be insured against every possible ambiguity through indications of tempo, shading, phrasing, accentuation, and so on, it always contains hidden elements that deff definition.

is manifested in the simultanâ‚Źous layering of contrasting and often unrelated dimensions musical time and memory within a single composition.

Roman Ingarden, the Polish phenomenologist and student of Edmund Husserl, views the musical work as "transcendent in still a higher degree than its performances." The musical score is a musi'cal "text," and, as such, the score substantiates the transhistorical nature of the musical work.

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The composer compares the notational mapping of this musical landscape to that of the surveyor or cartographer. In addition, he has noted the critical role his own observations of America's natural landscape have played in his musical compositions:

New musical concepts can lead to new forms of notation and new notational forms can generate new musical concepts. "lt is difficult to describe," wrote the American composer Morton Feldman, "what characterizes notational imagery. The degree to which a music's

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notation is responsible for much of the composition itself, is one of history's best-kept

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secrets."

Few composers today in their work explore as poetic and visionary a musical/notational landscape as the American composer Eric Richards. The innovative nature of his notational forms parallels the originality of his musical ideas. His passion for sound and the means by which he records and gives form to his microscopic observations of sound invest the notational sign, and by extension, the musical score with an independent objective value in itself. His "musical/notational style" compels our attention to the score's own material qualities (what the linguist Roman Jakobson refened to as the "palpability of the sign") and the beauty of its imagery*the score as aesthetic object. The composer acknowledges Jakobson's influence on what is one of his most radically original works: The Mouth of Night, for l2 breathers (l996la work that explores on various levels of sound, rhythm, meaning and metaphor the process of language itself.

single instrumental sound source (l I oboes, 72 clarinets, l0 double basses, 7 trumpets, l2 breathers). These works are best realized by a single performer using multi-track recording techniques. These instrumental sounds are subjected to microscopic analysis by the compoSer, who, in tum, saturates his time canvas with various nuancâ‚Źs and shades of instrumental color. Many of these compositions depict different perspectives, facets and planes of instrumental sound as they simultaneously evolve in different time planes. This

different distances in the landscape could be indistinct at one moment and come sharply into focus at another.

In this important sense, what the American novelist Henry James observed of the individuals

Paul Paccione Professor of Music Composition Western Illinois University, Macomb

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Many of the works in this exhibit explore timbral saturation and, as such, emanate from a

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who people the great American novels of the nineteenth century (Natty Bumppo, Hestor Prynne, Isabel Archer, Huckleberry Finn, Ishmael, Ahab) could be said of Eric Richards: they "seek to define themselves in a kind of cosmic landscape." I can think of no more poetic an expression of the "cosmic landscape" than the work of composer Eric Richards.

The works that are included in this exhibit of scores by the composer Eric Richards employ various phonic and graphic signs of both the conventional and unconventional kind. These scores have been executed both by hand as well as through the use of various print media.

Each individual work bears the composer's own personal imprint-something that is sadly missing from the vast majority of scores today, produced by composers on music notation computer software programs.

Full appreciation ofthe scores in this exhibit requires not only keen observation, but close reading and attentive listening that is both intuitive and critical. The placement of the notational signs on the page are representative ofpatterns ofsound and rhythm that comprise the work's "orchestration" in its fullest sense. Through contemplation of the work's orchestration we, in essence, become what Claude Levi-Strauss has described as the work's "silent performers."

I can almost trace the origin of my particular excitement in composition

to my ways of looking at the Western landscape...the way objects at