Shared by Doug Theriault:
A quote from an old interview by Victor Shonfield in 1972 with virtuoso musician and composer David Tudor:
“There is a paragraph in Busoni which speaks of notation as an evil separating musicians from music, and I feel everyone should know that this is true. I had been completely indoctrinated with the idea of faithfulness to notation in the early days and if you think of notation as being complete and you see what Busoni meant it can’t possibly be complete. Notation is an invention of the devil and when I became free of it to pieces like John Cages Fontana mix and music walk and later bussoti’s piano piece for David Tudor number 3., it really did it a lot for me.”
My response:
I love notation. I learned to read notes before I learned to read letters. It's a native language so the question is completely moot to me. But as with any other technology, it can be used for good or evil. The locus of people thinking notation = music is pretty limited, or maybe non-existent, i.e. a straw man. My whole work as an artist is in the liminal spaces between composition/improvisation and notation/aural transmission. I don't like locating the efficacy of notation in terms of class/race, despite its origins. It never works out well. Saying any kind of literacy or technology doesn't "suit" any group of people is satanic.
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