So this isn’t the first time I’ve attempted some type of graphical notation.  I had designs on this in my last project, and developed a type of compositional shorthand to represent different instrumentation ideas.  I was into it partly for the theory, but most of my interest was out of necessity – my traditional scoring stunk and I needed some way of relaying my ideas to musicians.  Here’s what my first attempt at graphical notation looked like:

[Here's a link to a high resolution image]

I printed the score out on a large (~20 feet) sheet of butcher paper and taped it to the dining room wall.  Over the next few weeks I made additions and notations, and in the end arrived at something I felt accurately represented what I was hearing in my head.  As a document of my compositional process, the score was a fantastic success.  But that was also the score’s main problem – it had become an object that represented my process.  Which was great for me, but I quickly found that my object ended up being a crappy tool for other performers.  When I rolled out my opus for a group of musicians expecting something akin to a traditional score, they looked at me like I had a horn on my head.  They got into it eventually, but it wasn’t the wild success I was hoping for.

So aside from it being more of an object and less of a tool, what went wrong?

Two main things:

1 – It was completely non-representational.  Without some type of traditional score component, people had nothing to grab onto.
2 – It wasn’t developed with the performers.  It had been in my head so long it made perfect sense to me, but without a frame of reference, anybody else looking at it saw just a swarm of lines.

So how can we do better?  I’m working on an example and hoped to have it ready by tomorrow, but I’m going to give it a little more time and try to get things working better.

Stay tuned.