Focusing on freedom and movement in music: methods of transcription inside a continuum of rhythm and sound.(Critical Essay)

INTRODUCTION

TRANSCRIPTION FROM THE SOUND-RHYTHM CONTINUUM is certainly one of the most revolutionary techniques in new music composition. However, in what follows, this subject will be considered not only from a methodological point of view but also from a more aesthetic one approaching the idea of the imaginary in music. The musical imaginary can be understood as a private inner world, consisting of intuitions, impulses, free associations, internal representations, memory, fantasies, or reverie-induced aural perceptions. The imaginary can be translated into music through a chrono-graphical recording method that utilizes a precise drawing process similar to a sound recording procedure, in which the musical matter is broken up into numerous chrono-acoustic categories. By so doing, traditional notions of rhythm and sound are enlarged to create a broader reference for graphic recording methods.

This discussion will concentrate mainly on a different understanding of transcribing what is considered a continuum of rhythm and sound. With no specific reference to a pre-existing musical language, this compositional methodology is based upon a chrono-acoustical description of either an imaginary individual universe or of other methodologies that tend towards abstract transformations of musical material.

The application of chrono-graphical recording and transcription methods need not be restricted to the compositional field. This precise musical notation can also serve the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology where a wide variety of chrono-acoustical components could be easily incorporated. Also, its application would be useful to traditional music where vocal and instrumental articulations come from both oral and written practices. In order to elaborate upon these ideas the structure of the continuum will first be described in general terms, an idea already discussed in previous articles (Estrada 1990, 1994a, 1994b).

A PHYSICAL CONTINUITY BETWEEN RHYTHM AND SOUND

Twentieth-century music has contributed to a new understanding of the relationship between sound and rhythm. Musicians such as Julian Carrillo or Alois Haba researched microtonal systems as can be found in Indian or Byzantine music--or even in the European Renaissance, the sixteenth-century cartographer and musicologist Gerhardus Mercator, who proposed a temperament at 53 tones per octave, being one example (Johnston, in Vinton 1974, 483-4). Carrillo's instruments were capable of achieving about 800 tempered micro-intervals within an octave, a number at which the human ear will perceive pitch transitions as a continuum (Estrada 1988a, 126-7; 1988b, 183-7).

Henry Cowell emphasized the existence of several parallels between sound and rhythm; i.e., by the identification of the harmonic divisions of both domains in which a similarity can be observed between pitch frequency and rhythmic metronomical proportions (Cowell 1930, 100.). In 1931 he designed an original instrument constructed by Lev Termen--the Rhythmicon--used in his work Rhythmicana to generate low frequencies according to the harmonic division of a duration of a second as a reference unit (Slonimsky 1988, 151). Some of Cowell's ideas were applied and extended by Conlon Nancarrow, who proposed, starting in the forties, the use of several simultaneous tempi to treat contrapuntal imitations (Furst-Heidtmann 1986, 54). His works for player piano were radical in that they offered new perceptual experiences of rhythm: a single melodic sequence, played at a tempo of approximately 200 notes per second--already a pitch frequency--became a timbre in which the melodic rhythm--previously understood as a discontinuu m--became a continuum to human perception (Estrada 1994c).