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Early in my musical education I realized that one of the most exciting domains of new music—the graphic scores of the 60s and 70s, including everything from brief texts on notecards to lavish watercolors and drafting work—was also one of its most poorly understood and least-known. Most of us (“us” being professionally trained musicians) only ever experienced them in a brief unit in our lecture course on the history of the 20th century, and almost none of us worked on actually playing them.

So when I got to my last course of formal training—a doctorate in composition—I and a few of my colleagues decided we would take it upon ourselves to sit down with the scores themselves (the university had a massive archive of them, sitting unsorted in a large map case in the music library). It took us a couple years of playing with them—and listening to some of the old recordings, I confess that our efforts were … not the most successful—but this first-hand experience was invaluable in understanding how the scores work, how they differ from one another as well as from conventionally notated ones, and what some of their underlying æsthetics might be.

That was a couple decades ago at this point, with another doctorate (this one in musicology) dedicated to trying to explain those scores within some kind of theoretical framework that I think makes sense for them. I don’t think I’m anywhere closer to being an “expert” at them, but I’m at least to the point where I think I can write about them coherently, and hopefully reach a wider audience than the rather narrow confines of academia might otherwise afford me.

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