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All scores are graphic; but some are more graphic than others
Kerry Andrews looks at relations between scores and images
The title of this brief article plays on a dichotomy that became central to the creation (and demise?) of graphic scores. The word graphic relates to clarity (ie clearly demonstrating) but also refers to the use of signs and symbols that are not necessarily immediately transparent. 'Musical graphics' give us an insight into an overlapping section of the visual and aural arts, an area that is broader than we realise, especially in the 20th century.
Graphic music or graphic notation came out of attempts by composers in the 50's to articulate a different relationship of music/sound to composer and musician. Composers like Brown, Cage, Feldman, Wolff and others were part of a sea change that enabled multiplicity to grow out of the modernist framework. Early graphic scores, like Feldman's Projection 1 (1951), were designed as 'open' works and related to other art works which dealt with chance and autonomy. These composers had especially strong links with visual artists and it's interesting that two of the artists who influenced Earle Brown developed a fluidity of relationships in their practices from very different perspectives. The mobiles created by Alexander Calder explore moving forms that created unexpected and in some ways undetermined relationships. These relations take place in the viewer's realm, immediately before them.
The paintings of Jackson Pollock, on the other hand are static traces of the artist's anarchic gestures left by the process of working. In the case of graphic notation there are parallels - the graphics present a distancing of the 'music' both from the direct 'taste' and control of the composer and often challenge the accepted forms of reading and consequently of performance. In the case of these composers their exploration of notation was motivated by new musical concerns and sound worlds based on silence and sound as 'pure' sound. "Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions." (Cage) The creation of a different and distanced aspect to notation can also be traced back to the ironic and machine aesthetic of Dada artists like Marcel Duchamp, particularly through the work of Cage.
Graphic scores, at their best, create a collaborative situation between the composer and performer. Composers like Anestis Logothetis and Cornelius Cardew made a different kind of musical graphics from those mentioned above which demand a more creative input from the performer. I first came across the scores of Logothetis in a book called Seeing Through Drawing by Philip Rawson. Rawson wrote several books that discuss the methods and techniques of drawing, comparing styles and functions. His method analyses drawings into constituent parts and often specifically into actions, eg the kinetic language of the making of the work and the building of separate marks into a unified whole. He maintained that the viewers ability to read the working method (thinking) gave meaning to the tenor of the piece (his term tenor is what we would usually call subject in figurative terms).
It is interesting to note that Rawson used many musical terms in his writing about drawing. He believed that a rich drawing would include a gamut of line types and directions and often criticised images that failed to do this (gamut comes from the Medieval term gamma-ut meaning the complete range of musical tones). Another term he often used was brio. The reason I mention Rawson is that I believe he makes a case for the graphic score as a valid explicit connection between the visual and the musical worlds, at least in terms of defined (that is notated) action. This kind of notation is a specific area of work and requires as much clarity of vision as any other.
One last point about the relationship of drawing to musical notation; colour in drawing is often brought about by means other than specified pigment, eg through textural relations and densities (implied colour) and is possibly closer to aural colour than painting.