whoa! didn't know about that cage book. and i want it. badly. gotta highlight this 2005 amazon user review:
if it is possible for a composer to have a signature, then it is possible to be able to recognize the "voice", the "timbral signature" of a composer from what you see on the page, like a DNA configuration, you are what you are for what you become "magnetize" towards, some shape in music, genre, patterns, listening to telephone generators, or simply making money, lots of it,And if one comprehends this it is first seen in the musical language one employs, and the shapes,densities, distributed,conflated in the designs of melodic import,harmonies,registers, rhythms of graphics, someone like Stravinsky was interested in both while in Switzerland, I beleive Zurich he was travelling with Maurice Ravel, they happened into a bookshop where Stravisnky simply purchased a large bound book of blank pages, handsome paper heavyset. This became the 'Sketchbook' for the "Rite of Spring" done into different coloured inks to incourage Stravinsky's compositional process of re-arranging fragments(assemblage) of what he writes.Cage has always been interested in notation for the pure challenge in it,what the line tells you,and in the 1950s, with the demise of serial music,Cage began doing his scores in graphic(s) notation,it was for a sense of linear and conceptual freedom,and the "Concert for Piano"(circa 1955) being the ultimate encyclopedic magnum citadel for graphics in music. It was not until in (1965-1967) Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise" where we find a work of similar scope, although for Cardew, "Treatise",done with impeccable craftsmenship was a score of 193 pages for improvisation, for AMM. For a number of years just about everyone was interested, fascinated by the Question "What is Notation?" and why do we need to write certain things in certain ways ignoring others. Of course if you simply wrote music without a bend toward the truly innovative,, the experimental strain,there never was a question,there was then the question of how to deal with complexity, which simply grew by leaps and bounds,irresepctive much of the time of the content or meaning, which we can still ponder.
This "Notations" originally published by the Something Else Press, and Dick Higgins (a post-Cage activist,Fluxus maverick)was a contribution to this quest, this Jabes-ian Question. For many the fascination with graphics was in the pre-compositional phases,like creating charts and pitch configurations, arrays,templates and harmony notebooks of intervallic import, mining the depths of the endless almost possibilities, of two-three-four, hexachords, tetra-chords.Today with the aid of the computer and fractal-like thinking this is commonplace. So this book reads like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" in many respects, the "Here Comes Everybody, for everbody seems to be here of those cadre within the post-war avant-garde. Cage simply wrote a letter to hundreds of composers asking to provide one sheet and one comment on what they think music notation is/was, should be,could be, and is not. The book is a wonderful ride through the avant-garde, and it is great compelling nourishment for the composer to see the various graphic icons, of someone's hand as Boulez's "Second Piano Sonata", or Carter's "Piano Concerto", Cardew's "Treatise", or Ralph Shapey,Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt, Christian Wolff,Frederic Rzewski, Roman Haubenstock Ramati, Bo Nilsson,Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, and the Fluxus people are here as well, with the budding beginning of conceptual music, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik,David Tudor,Alison Knowles,George Brecht,Giuseppi Ciardi,and other Europeans Peter Maxwell Davies,Jean-Claude Eloy,Pierre Schaffer, Luc Ferrari,Pierre Henry, George Maciunes,, Jackson Maclow(poet not composer), Franco Evangelisti,Dieter Schnebel,Henry Cowell, Virgil Thompson, Ben Johnston, Lou Harrison. . . Gerhard Stabler has done an update of this book "Notations" with the younger generation of composers represented.