Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Prosaic

From time to time, I've made prose scores, scores in which the instructions to the players are in words rather than in a conventional music notation. I did this a lot more in the past, especially when I was working in learning environments. A prose score is often an efficient way to get into some aspect or another of sound or of music-making. Sometimes these scores were musically sufficient in and of themselves, and sometimes they were points of departure for more conventionally notated works. (A collection of my prose scores from the 80's can be found here).

I've recently begun some etudes for instruments, beginning with the piano, and the beginning of these explorations is a set of three prose scores for the Swiss pianist Hildegard Kleeb. In addition to her concertizing, she teaches piano to young people, and I imagined these three pieces (Dr WOLF's Complete & Correct SCHOOL of PIANO LEVITATION) might be of use to young hands and ears. These might eventually work themselves into a more fixed and/or conventionally notated format, but who knows? (A PDF file is here).

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