Pictures of Music

I’m a huge fan of graphical notation of music. I used to think it was all crap. The idea that a musician/artist would interpret a work of art in order to perform a work of art is very interesting. Yes, reading Western musical notation requires interpretation, however, you can simply perform by directly translating what’s on the page. That’s a bit like reading poetry in monotone. Graphical notation, on the other hand, requires you to dig into what you’re seeing. You can’t directly translate the images into specific sounds without a bit of predetermination.

There’s a cool website put up by Northwestern University called Pictures of Music. This site describes graphical notation and includes great examples. The site itself is a work of art and provides an interesting way to look at a thought provoking subject.

Graphical music notation is notation characterized by non-traditional musical symbols arranged in a visual design rather than conventional musical syntax.

This notation emerged in the early twentieth century because of a growing feeling among some composers that traditional Western notation was inadequate for their musical ideas.

George Cacioppo, Cassiopeia 1962 detail

• Pictures of Music, Block Museum at Northwestern
• Turntablist Transcription Method
• Notations21

Daddoo!