Composers, performers, and conductors who come out of the classical conservatory tradition in the US are in a terrible bind. While the music is simply not that popular, its production requires vast economic resources, from massive opera houses and concert halls to expensive instruments and highly specialized elite training pathways that begin in early childhood. Its lack of a wide market share—and its longstanding association with “high” culture—means it survives only through the patronage of the wealthy, who use it to burnish their reputations and art-wash their money. Meanwhile, dominant US ideology insists that anything that can’t be marketized offers nothing for society. Thus, contemporary new music practitioners must contend with an impossible contradiction: the unpopularity of what they do is not only a problem for economic survival but also—due to neoliberal ideology—a source of deep shame.
This situation results in dissonant branding strategies. On the one hand, august institutions like the Metropolitan Opera must find ways of portraying themselves as welcoming spaces “for everyone,” even though this is demonstrably not the case; on the other hand, entrepreneurially minded artists promote themselves as “anti-institutional” upstarts leaving these legacy entities behind, claiming to appeal to bigger and more diverse audiences. In both cases, the question of “access” is paramount, and is shaped in essentially commercial terms: this music is a product that needs to be better tailored to consumer desires or needs marketing.
Some of these contradictions were the subject of a debate sparked by US composer Christopher Cerrone’s post on X (formerly Twitter) of a bar of Brian Ferneyhough’s famously dense notation (a measure from his 2012 chamber work Liber Scintillarum) along with the barb: “It is actually so funny that this music exists and people take it seriously.”1 From the responses, it became clear that many participants were operating from two entirely distinct epistemic positions when it came to the concept of “notation” itself, and what it is for.
Ferneyhough is part of a small community of artists with a shared interest in maximizing the complexity of musical textures. Their works deploy extended techniques, microtonality, and dense layers (particularly of rhythms). Such composers’ approaches to notation are central aspects of their orientation toward composition. Achieving this density and microscopic complexity requires an exploratory and minutely attentive engagement with notation itself, and the resulting scores are often “impossible” to perform “perfectly.” This quality evoked outrage from some of the commenters on Cerrone’s post, who viewed this impossibility as an act of pointless tyranny on Ferneyhough’s part; Cerrone even implied that such notation shows a lack of “empathy for performers.” Clearly, for him, as for many people engaged in new music, the technology of musical notation is simply functional—a tool to be used to explain to performers what the composter wants them to do. Any way of using it that does not conform to that rigid functionality appears as an act of disservice to the musicians who perform the work, and thus, presumably, to the audiences trying to listen to it.
I’m a musicologist who studies American classical music and its various interweavings with capitalist ideologies and material practices. For this conversation, I engaged my friend Greg Stuart to help me understand how these rhetorical maneuvers function in this discourse, and what they disguise. Greg is a percussionist and professor who has a physical disability called focal dystonia, a neurological condition that causes involuntary muscle movements in a particular body part, which for him is his left hand. The first symptoms manifested during Greg’s first year of college, where he had become deeply invested in percussion, and in the kind of intense, dedicated practice regimen that is required for success in the percussion studio. As the years passed, he became unable to play simple techniques or even, for a period of time, to hold a stick in his “bad” hand. Greg’s doctor of musical arts dissertation explores the years of anxiety, denial, and despair (not to mention physical pain) he experienced as he fought to hide what he then considered the “wrongness” of his hand during practice and performance.2 He writes that he came to feel like his left hand didn’t belong to him, and was more like a “blunt club” attached to his body, outside his control. Eventually, much of the “normative” professional percussion repertoire became inaccessible to him, and by the end of his master’s degree, he was demoralized and defeated: “There was genuinely nothing I felt comfortable doing as a percussionist. I had two hands, but only one of them was mine.”3
Although he discovered that most musicians who develop focal dystonia ultimately leave the profession, Greg chose instead to engage with the problem of his left hand to find a different path toward percussion. Working with music that has what we might consider different “goals” than most of the canonical percussion repertoire helped Greg construct a theory of Western conservatory percussion as a uniquely “handed” practice, meaning a practice foregrounding “handedness” above all other things. Theorizing percussion in this way helped him see it, and himself within it, more clearly, and formed the basis of a new approach to percussion that doesn’t rely on handedness at all.
To return to the debate in Cerrone’s Twitter thread: interestingly, for Greg it was engaging with the kinds of thorny, contemporary, and experimental music assumed to be exclusionary that provided an important first step toward becoming a different kind of percussionist than conventional training models tend to create. What follows is a collaboratively created dialogue between Greg and me, in which we work together to try to understand some of the political problematics generated in high-profile, professionalized contemporary music-making around questions of access, as well as questions about what music is “for.”
—Marianna Ritchey
***
Marianna Ritchey (MR): When we think of a musician struggling in the way you did as a student, we might imagine two possibilities: either the musician will be forced to give up their performance career, or they will need to look for “easier” scores that they can continue playing “despite” their disability. For you, however, dense, difficult music brought you back to yourself as a musician. In fact, I think the first piece you describe working on as you were developing your ideas about “handedness” was Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet (1991), which uses the same notational style Cerrone criticized for showing a lack of “empathy” for its performers. How do you account for this?
Greg Stuart (GS): In the case of the Twitter thread you sent, it seems like the anti-Ferneyhough views come from people who, for whatever reason, genuinely do not understand what Ferneyhough’s notation is for. That is, it feels like they are willfully disregarding why someone would write music that looks like that in the first place and what that kind of notation could do in performance.
To suggest that Liber Scintillarum, for example, has a lack of empathy for its performers is to suggest that the composer’s job—meaning all composers’ jobs—is to provide the most legible possible instructions for performers to follow in order to easily and precisely realize exactly what the composer intends, without having to struggle to parse those intentions. But as the music scholar Stuart Duncan argues, New Complexity composers and their “sympathetic” performers don’t operate via this expectation at all. Rather, they are attempting to “explicitly employ a notational representation that channels the performer into making decisions and taking ultimate responsibility for their interpretation.”4 In short, we might say that New Complexity, which deploys impossible notation in order to demand personal choices and creative, interpretive decisions from every performer, is the opposite of “high” modernism, which sought to remove performers from the equation altogether. To casually assert that such scores demonstrate a lack of “empathy” for performers not only assumes what scores have (always) been for, but also that all performers are the same.
MR: You provide an example belying those assumptions, in that the question of what a given score or approach to notation is “for” and how “performers” will self-evidently receive it obviously has major implications for a performer whose disability means they can’t do many of the basic things most composers assume performers can do. So would you say that a score like Ferneyhough’s is “for” the composer, or is it “for” the performer? And if it’s “for” the performer, what does it mean that it’s so difficult to realize?
GS: The point of the Ferneyhough composition, if it can be reduced in this way, which I’m somewhat reticent to do, is that you can’t read it. Or, rather that its “complexity” forces you to invent a new way of reading it on your own. It absolutely resists “sight-reading.” You could thus easily say that because of the score’s difficulty, he actually respects performers more.
MR: In that sense, a score like this is a gift to performers, a puzzle for them to have fun solving, a technology for asking them to be creative and inventive. It makes me think of those Renaissance-era scores for which performers must first solve a riddle or break a code before its revealed how to sing the madrigal or whatever it is. I love how there’s something there beyond just the “sounded” product that is heard by audiences; the puzzle or code is not audible to the audience, it’s just a fun secret between the composer and the performers themselves.
GS: Exactly. With his notation, you have to ask the question “what does it mean to read a score?” We assume that if you can read music, you can just plop down any old score and you can, more or less, make your way through it. But Ferneyhough’s scores are not like that at all. You have to decode the music. And everyone will decode it differently.
Concert Hall, Katowice, Poland. License: CC0.
MR: It’s also interesting to look through that whole thread and see a bunch of people all talking about notation, when it’s not at all clear to me that they all understand “notation” in the same way or as the same kind of tool. Almost like if you and I were both talking about “scissors,” but you were thinking of scissors as something you cut with and I was thinking of them as something you use the other end to hammer with.
GS: Any notation is always already an abstraction. The fact that we see certain notations as “easier” than others—as “normal” rather than something weird or difficult, or both—is just a bias of history. It’s just because we’ve become used to one form of notation, or to certain linkages between specific notations and their sounded results. But the idea that notation communicates all its sounding results or that it can be “perfectly” performed is just a product of historical inertia around particular performance styles or practices. It is, to a certain extent, an illusion. As Ferneyhough says, “No notation, of whatever iconically representational state, can presume to record information encompassing all aspects of the sonic phenomenon for which it stands.”5 In other words, there will always exist a kind of “distance” between performer, score, and performance through the necessarily “mediatizing” nature of the notation, all of which is to say that all scores require interpretation.
MR: To appropriate a term from Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy: or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism, learning a “thick” score like Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet—something densely layered that requires the performer to slow down and think critically and creatively about what’s being communicated rather than just confirming previously held notions—is difficult for everyone regardless of skill level.6 Steven Schick wrote a famous article about the process of learning the piece in which he asks his readers to reflect on one of the “casualties” of the fast-paced professional performance environment (and its attendant connections to the demands of a capitalist marketplace), which is “the small but pleasurable distinction between the act of learning a piece of music and the art of performing it.”7 For Schick, Bone Alphabet was so hard to learn that it slowed down the whole learning process to a “glacial” pace, which opens a vast space for its performers, each of whom must then “translate” the score given their own chosen instruments and their own individual skill sets, interests, bodies, and creative goals. Realizing Bone Alphabet requires the performer to create something new, to grapple with the creative process and with themselves.
GS: Yeah, and for me with Bone Alphabet, after that kind of deep, durational learning, a performance then burns with an uncommon intensity, because you’ve slowly built everything in the piece from zero to get to that point. It took me seven months of nearly nonstop work to learn and perform the piece, which was slow and difficult but also incredible and deeply transformative. Dealing with the score’s “superabundance” of details taught me a lot about my body and my “deficient” left hand, for instance, including some of my own admittedly contradictory desires around wanting to play the piece in the first place. So, it’s hard for me to imagine wanting to “simplify” something that rich by, you know, compressing the dense rhythmic language into more easily readable triplets or whatever through some kind of “best practices” approach to notation. It’s absolutely not a form of “control” over the player, but a real invitation to play—with the material, the act of reading, interpreting, technical challenges, etc. It’s an invitation to make something, together. And by definition the composer doesn’t know what the ultimate act of that play will look like. The piece is not realizable or knowable in the composer’s mind alone. It requires interpretation. It needs the thickness of the score as a “mediating” structure, per Kornbluh.
MR: Is a composition created with audiences, with performers, or by the composer themselves? How an individual answers this question seems to have great bearing on what they think the technology of musical notation is “for.” You opened a fascinating new theoretical motherlode for me when you pointed out that many new music composers today write their pieces directly on the computer, where they create a direct visual representation of how and where each sound in a composition ought to appear. They build the piece using samples from a sound library which they arrange onscreen to create the sonic textures they’re looking for. They can press play and hear this arrangement as many times as they like and minutely tweak it until they can hear is exactly “right.” As you describe it, listening to a playback of a constructed onscreen composition represents a hearing of a seemingly “perfect” or “yet-to-come” notation through speakers while the composer works. Then, using notation software, they can simply print it out as standard notated music, which they can give to performers to read. Sifting through some of the interviews Cerrone has given in recent years, I found that he describes his process in exactly this way. He says he composes “in the computer,” where he meticulously arranges samples of sounds in a digital audio workstation (DAW). “My whole process is to mock everything up down to the very slightest note and then kind of reimagine it when I orchestrate it … I reimagine this mocked-up audio file as the real thing.”8
GS: There’s nothing wrong with composing on (or with) the computer, or with using technology in your work; it would be absurd to argue so in any categorical manner—so much popular music is made on the computer, and obviously there’s lots of incredible music made this way, in all sorts of genres. And also, a huge portion of my own work, particularly with Michael Pisaro-Liu, grew out of the use of technology and the computer, for which we explored close-mic’d multitracked assemblages to capture and arrange large quantities of small sounds that the ear wouldn’t likely perceive on its own. So I’m really the last person to draw some kind of hard line about how music is just “notes on the page.” But I also think if you compose that way—that is, on your computer screen—and you’re composing with the intention of then handing it off to human performers to play, which is how classical music is mediated, then there’s this real “flattening” of meaning, as the composer enters into a more one-to-one correspondence type of space with how the notation relates to the sounding music. In Kornbluh’s Immediacy, she talks about the disappearance of third-person novels—it’s all first-person auto-fiction now. And I’m like, “Well that’s just writing music on your computer with MIDI playback.” That is, a “personal” sonic mirror reflecting back a “perfect” image that you then hand off to performers to reproduce one pixel at a time, where the sounding music and its preperformance digital mock-up are basically the same. There’s no longer a distance, or there’s very, very little, between the two. This all feels a lot like the “cutting out the middleman” that Kornbluh is talking about in everything from the production style of streaming media to the shipping practices of platform capitalism. That is, rather than engaging with the idea that “the medium is the message,” you get rid of the medium—in this case the notation—or at least make it seem as if the notation is totally seamless, transparent, and/or purely functional. And so, because the notation is (apparently) not “in the way,” you get the sonic result “right now,” “as it is.” The sound-notation relation is, following Kornbluh’s highlighting of so many of the terms now omnipresent in digital capitalism, “instant access,” “direct message,” “#nofilter,” “on demand,” and so forth. You swipe right on the thing you want right now. You click and the thing appears the same day on your doorstep. What you see is what you get—and you get it instantaneously. The seemingly “frictionless” experience of a ride-call app like Uber is also present in the piano-scroll MIDI timeline of your DAW and it spills over onto the page of your music. And the sound of that apparent seamlessness can be heard in the music. If that’s what you think notation is for—seamless functional translation of “performerly” information—then of course Ferneyhough’s music or other compositions that take notation as part of their compositional material aren’t going to make much sense to you. It’s just an entirely different compositional project.
MR: On the one hand I can see the way that composing in a DAW is cool, from a certain perspective. In one sense it’s like an interesting extension of the old romantic paradigm where the composer has ideas in their brain and then has to figure out a way of conveying those “purely musical ideas” to performers in such a way that the music can actually be heard by others. But on the other hand, isn’t it already “being heard by others”? Isn’t its sonic realization already accomplished thanks to the incredibly sophisticated construction and playback tool of the DAW itself? In the nineteenth century the piece really did exist only in the composer’s head, so passing notation off to musicians was the only way anyone else could hear it, and there’s something beautiful about that process in how music required collective creative labor. But with this DAW-composed stuff, which you can already hear by pressing play, what is the actual point of having human performers play it live if their task is to just do what the computer does and not interpret it themselves?
GS: Yes, the sonic realization is already accomplished on the computer, and this is precisely why critics of New Complexity scores feel that there’s too much “intervening” structure in the notation. They think it can and should be made more “simple,” more like what it “really” is, and what it “really” is is the audio file. The goal here seems to be that the onscreen image and the performed sound should map onto one another as closely as possible, so what you see is what you hear. But for the performer that kind of mapping leads to a hollowing out of possible interpretations and just shifts the performance toward pure “execution.” Of course, many conservatory-trained musicians actually desire this arrangement because it confirms their expertise as highly skilled workers. So, there is a little “two-step,” as it were, going on between performers and composers in this regard.
One measure of Ferneyhough’s Etudes Transcendentales.
MR: In another interview, Cerrone talks about indeterminate music. He says his students are always trying to leave space for indeterminacy, whereas he’s always trying to make them write everything out. And he says his students tell him they want to “give freedom to the performers,” and his answer to them is “I can assure you that the performers, unless they’re some very special rare breed, do not want any freedom.”9 Do you think that’s part of the “two-step” you describe? I mean, I assume he’s right, at least about a certain kind of conservatory-trained performer; I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about. This is his community, not mine. But it’s hard for me to understand why a performer would just want to be told exactly, precisely what to do—I guess because it’s hard for me to understand why anyone would want that in any context. Unless I think of performing music as an exercise in displaying excellence and perfection, more like being an Olympic athlete or something, even though for me that’s never been part of my own experience or goals as a musician, admittedly a musician in a very different type of scene than this one we’re talking about.
GS: I understand that comment about performers. The injunction to “play it as written” is so deeply ingrained in classical music culture and its performance pedagogy that one would not be mistaken for thinking that it was literally the point of the entire enterprise. I see it in my students too, even when we work on pieces that are about as far removed from that model as you could imagine—say, Toshi Ichiyanagi's Pratyahara Event (1963/73) or Annea Lockwood’s bayou-borne (2016). Even with such compositions, students are concerned about whether they are “doing it right,” almost to the point that it feels like they are demanding that I tell them what to do. The musicologist Anna Bull terms the extreme focus on technical ability, precision, and accuracy in classical music a “pedagogy of correction,” a phrase which has frankly haunted me since I first came across it, particularly when I observe it while working with students on pieces that offer such deep invitations to explore.10 So yeah, it’s not surprising to hear that, in the context of a composition lesson, a student might be told to eliminate an indeterminate element in favor of simply writing out “exactly” what they (apparently) want; when the entire culture is oriented around “control,” there needs to be as little “slippage” as possible between the score’s “image” and its resulting performance. This is just seen as de facto “good” for everyone involved.
MR: As I’m thinking through these questions about performers and difficulty, I’m also thinking about listeners, and I’m noticing a certain attitude toward “consumption” in the new music discourses I’ve been interested in. Everyone agrees that classical music is dying and that the main problem is that it isn’t popular. Attacking this lack of popularity is basically everybody’s shared goal, both individually and at the level of the institution (as in all these “outreach” projects that city orchestras are doing). The “thinness” that seems to be prioritized in these new music scenes that hate modernism seems related to a perceived greater marketability of what we might call “thin” music, in contrast to Kornbluh’s idea of “thick” texts. “Thin” music here is music that, supposedly, directly communicates to both performers and audiences. There’s no fuzzy mediating going on.
GS: Missing the point of certain “difficult” scores—which is the difficulty itself—seems symptomatic of a political-economic culture that has shifted from production to circulation. If the main goal is circulation, then the problem with the apparent “fussiness” of “difficult” notation is that it impedes a particular piece’s uptake and circulation in the culture, i.e., how smoothly and quickly the machinery of commissioning, learning, and performance can function. That is, we can’t have anything that slows that down in any way. And so, since the economy has shifted from making things to speeding up how existing things circulate, we are getting a lot of music that, in certain ways, sort of feels like the “retweeting” of prior eras of music composition.
MR: In this paradigm, circulation is the point of making the music. And anything impeding that circulation (e.g., a score being too hard or whatever) is automatically bad, because the obvious goal of every composer should be to make accessible stuff that “speaks to” a broad audience in a direct way; it’s the desire for smooth circulation without any friction or stoppages. But what if what you desire is engagement with edges and difficulties and puzzles to solve and things to learn and be astounded by? Obviously the culture we live in is forcing us to want things that I don’t think we actually want. That is Marxism 101. I don’t want ChatGPT to “summarize” Capital volume one for me. I don’t want ChatGPT to make my own writing “easier” either, but I’m being relentlessly told that I do want this, that obviously everyone wants this. I don’t want music to just be easy to hear, or at least I don’t want it that way all the time. I also don’t want to be told what I’m supposed to find accessible or not. I want people to be different and I want them to show me something new that I couldn’t have figured out by myself. I want to be surprised, and even disturbed, and to struggle to incorporate new thoughts I never had to think before.
GS: The desire to “speed up the process,” as in the case of having ChatGPT write for you, feels a lot like, to paraphrase and hybridize Kornbluh and Adorno, “speeding up the circulation of pre-thought thoughts.” That is, we look into the “mirror,” and it reflects back to us perfectly the “patterns” we want to see. The mirror, a “large language model” in the case of ChatGPT, does not think. It just looks through its massive corpus of data for preexisting patterns and reassembles them into the formal veneer of some new text. On the surface it seems impressive when this new text appears, almost magical, but it also feels like we are skipping over an irreducible first step in the writing of any text. That is, writing is a form of thinking that can’t, or shouldn’t be, “outsourced.”
Let’s turn the argument around and ask why I find problematic the idea that pieces should have a one-to-one correspondence between how they look and how they sound. Why does it bother me? Using playback while composing can, of course, be helpful, and it can be useful when you’re first learning how to compose, or trying out how things might fit together, especially when it combines a lot of things you can’t do yourself—a piece for a large orchestra or a chamber ensemble or something. But there’s just something unsettling when you listen to a piece performed by humans but you have this deep sense that it was composed in a DAW. It’s hard to describe but it sort of feels like when you read a text and you just know that it was written in ChatGPT. It lacks loose ends and—“danger” is not quite the right word here. It’s like everything in the music has been screwed down, all the edges have been sanded off. By contrast, when you see an incredible improviser—someone like Keith Rowe, Matana Roberts, Taku Sugimoto, or Mary Halvorson—you get the sense that there’s this huge expanse and that anything could happen. With music that’s directly conceived of in a DAW/MIDI platform, it feels so incredibly scripted and inert. None of the performers could ever break out of the text in any meaningful way; there’s nothing they could do, they’re just fungible parts in the whole process. You could get any equally skilled performer in there to play the same part. It just feels so impersonal, and also like its representative of an ethos where the creation of the music—at home, on the computer—is the music, and the live performance is secondary. Liveness is obviously economically and ontologically crucial for “classical music,” but with a lot of this new stuff made inside a DAW, it’s so secondary, even if we say that we “value live performances.” And so I think some of this DAW-composer discourse bothers me as a performer, because despite it being all about using new cool pop-music technology to compose, it’s actually still a very old-fashioned notion of what composing entails.
MR: On the one hand I want to be charitable to the people arguing that composers need to be conscious of writing accessibly. There’s nothing wrong with thinking about the impact of your work on the workers you need in order for it to be realized, and in fact that’s very important to do. And I think one way Cerrone is probably using the word “empathy” when he says he needs to write in a clear and readable way for performers is that he has empathy for the super-compressed amount of time most professional performers have to learn a new piece before they have to perform it. But I just wish people wouldn’t universalize or celebrate stuff that’s actually just an economic necessity; like, okay, writing accessibly for performers under X or Y economic conditions shouldn’t translate to “anyone who doesn’t write this way lacks care for other humans or is being an elitist.” I wish there was more space for talking about the potentialities of difficulty, struggle, risk, and liveness. And in this case, it’s like the intended effect of the DAW-generated composition is to foreclose the very possibility of that “liveness” we associate with performance.
GS: Right. And from my perspective the problem is that the whole conversation just occupies a presumably “neutral” middle ground. There’s nothing at stake in it.
MR: What do you mean by that? What would be at stake in a piece of notation?
GS: I mean pieces where something can happen. I know that sounds kind of vague, but it is actually hard to say exactly what this “something” will be, precisely because it is not predictable or notatable. Unlike a score that just plainly expresses pretty much how it’s going to sound when performers play it back for you, what’s really going to happen when we do this Oliveros meditation or similarly exploratory process-oriented work, where something unforeseen might happen? It’s clear that there’s a real “gap” in the communicative chain between composer and performer. And the gap is crucial; you don’t want to get rid of it, as it’s generative of the whole process. Think of the original minimalists, for example, who so many new music composers are clearly channeling stylistically. Reich or Glass or Riley: they wrote stuff on the page and then just said “things repeat” or some equivalent suggestion. “To be held for a long time,” in LaMonte Young’s famous Composition 1960 #7. Maybe it’s a small difference, but there’s still this act of imagination going on, or at least a wager of “I wonder what will happen—to me, the room, the performers, the audience—if this perfect fifth, or whatever, simply continues on and on?” Or else they were experimenting with technology, making tape pieces, for instance, but this was with analog tech, which was much more imprecise and fuzzy. They weren’t listening to finished works at home on their laptops and then printing them off as scores and sending those scores to performers to “render.” In that model it’s extremely hard to imagine really anything happening, much less something truly unforeseen.
MR: With the idea of something unforeseen happening, my brain always goes to Adorno on how the culture industry serves us pre-thought ideas that we already know how to think. That’s why we enjoy consuming a Marvel movie or something like that. We know what it is already. We know everything about it and how to engage with it, and that feeling of already-knowing—of being served something you already know you like—can be intensely pleasurable. The idea of valuing the unforeseen outcome is also political. It’s how a lot of radical political movements understand political change and revolution: we have to move into revolution without knowing what the exact outcome will be, because we don’t know yet what kinds of conditions will exist or what kinds of needs we will have in the future. These will always depend on context and community. In your dissertation, where you develop your theories of handedness and non-instrumentality (and in a lot of these experimental scores you’re into), I see a related orientation, where someone is trying to ask unfamiliar questions to trace not-yet-known potentialities. I have been obsessed lately with this idea of the epistemological frame: what kinds of “frames” do we use to see and understand reality, and how can we even notice those frames in the first place, much less change them or break out of them? Your idea of exploring what it could mean to think of “percussion” outside of “handedness” is such a great example of probing the frame itself. You do so much work to show that this is more than just a weird thought experiment. It actually has major implications for music, study, the body, life.
See →.
Gregory William Stuart, “A Percussionist’s Practice” (DMA diss., UC San Diego, 2009).
Stuart, “A Percussionist’s Practice,” 15.
Stuart Paul Duncan, “To Infinity and Beyond: A Reflection on Notation, 1980s Darmstadt, and Interpretational Approaches to the Music of New Complexity,” Journal for New Music and Culture, no. 9 (2010).
Brian Ferneyhough, quoted in Duncan, “To Infinity and Beyond,” 9.
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024).
Steven Schick, “Developing an Interpretive Context: Learning Brian Ferneyhough's Bone Alphabet,” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (1994): 132.
“Music Notation Can’t Capture This ‘Quantum Rhythm,” interview with Christopher Cerrone, posted January 12, 2021 by David Bruce Composer, YouTube →.
“Opera, Electronics, Rhythm, and Teaching (ft. Christopher Cerrone),” posted November 1, 2023 by the Saad Haddad Show, YouTube →.
Anna Bull, “Equity in Music Education: Getting It Right: Why Classical Music’s ‘Pedagogy of Correction’ Is a Barrier to Equity,” Music Educators Journal 108, no. 3 (2022): 65–66.
