John Rot - "Where does the Work of Art Reside?"

Where does the work of art reside? 

What does it include? 

What does it require? 

Who decides?

As an example, let’s take Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. 

Where does the work of art reside? 

Does "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" refer to the score? A live performance? A recording? Which edition? Which venue? Which orchestra and conductor?

What does it include? 

If, for instance, the work resides in the *performance* of the symphony (in other words, in the execution of the composer's instructions), does it include poor performances? How many wrong notes and asynchronous rhythms are required to negate the performance as being the work of art in question? Does it include arrangements? Intentional deviations from and simplifications of Beethoven's instructions? Does it include a beginning violinist's recognizable performance of "Ode to Joy?"

What does it require? 

Must it be heard? Must it be hearable? Must it have an orchestra? An audience? Must it be performed top to bottom, or does a rehearsal count? What about an open rehearsal, with comments given only between movements amid the inevitable coughing of the unacknowledged audience? Does the imagined but unheard performance in the head of the profoundly deaf composer himself constitute the work of art? Did Beethoven never experience his own Ninth Symphony? 

Who decides?

My own thinking, likewise susceptible to all the nits you can think to pick: 

Ultimately, music is a sonic art form. Sound, by virtue of its physical reality, takes place during and across time. Music is sound: created, heard. It is not a moment or a memory, but a process. Crucially, it is not notation; it is the execution of notation.

How, then, to approach the One Sheet Project, in which the primary emphasis is placed on the instructions, rather than on their realization? When the work of art is meant to reside in the notation, what should the art be? 

The score for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony leaves little room, relatively speaking, for flexibility. Differences in tempo, dynamics, articulation, and the many other imprecise elements of Romantic Era Western music notation only amount to so much. Any performance that adequately follows the instructions will produce more or less the same effect, or at the very least one which is easily recognizable as the work of art in question. 

What else could notation be? What else could notation include? What else could notation require? Do I get to decide?

What if recognizable works of music, rather than constituting the output, constituted the input? Instead of Genius-Inspired dots and lines being churned through specialized training, equipment, and agreed-upon stipulations, before eventually spitting Beethoven out the other end, we could put Beethoven into the mechanism to begin with. What would come out the other side? Genius in, genius out? Could we put something else in? Could unchanging notation—conceived as manipulation rather than creation—yield infinite sonic flexibility, dependent solely on the sonic input? A single page of notation, with unlimited potential results. If so, where would the resulting work of art reside?

The page in front of you presents two approaches to notation. The top, first scribbled 200 years ago, continues to stand the test of time, communicating clear instructions which, thanks to significant shared cultural understanding and conventions, produce more or less the same result today. The bottom is my contribution, a script in the Python computer programming language which takes as its input a sound recording (or, more accurately, a spectral analysis of a sound recording produced with Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis, or SPEAR), and outputs MIDI data which effectively "synthesizes" the sound in question.* This process has been applied identically to ten different audio files. What you are hearing consists entirely of digital piano sounds; the original audio is not present in any way. The notation does not present instructions for performing a specific piece of music; rather, it presents instructions for "performing" anything. With that in mind, who is the composer? Who is the artist? Who is the performer? And, most importantly...

[see title]

*I am not the first composer to explore this concept of piano-based synthesis. Credit to the brilliant Peter Ablinger for his work with this concept, which inspired me to create my own.

Track List

1. Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 - Mvmt. IV (excerpt)

2. J.S. Bach: Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147 - "Jesus bleibet meine Freude" (excerpt)

3. Lennon-McCartney: "Yesterday"

4. George Frideric Handel: Messiah, HWV 56 - "Hallelujah" (excerpt)

5. Tom Scholz: "More than a Feeling" (excerpt)

6. Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 - Mvmt. III (excerpt)

7. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor - Mvmt. V (excerpt)

8. Led Zeppelin: "Black Dog" (excerpt)

9. Mariah Carey: "All I Want for Christmas is You" (excerpt)

10. A reading of the italicized paragraph above