It would be difficult to imagine how best to document Mark Applebaum’s The Metaphysics of Notation, a 12-panel 70-foot graphic score, hung for a year in the Cantor Arts Centre Museum at Stanford University and performed each week for 45 weeks from various interpreters – from solo artists to ensembles, employing electric and acoustic instruments. Condensing all of this onto a DVD, featuring a documentary, scrolling versions of the score, and an edited, compressed version of the performances, necessarily leaves a lot out.
This latter aspect works least well, visually employing still shots of individual performances which don’t sync with the soundtrack. The images themselves are hardly engaging, straightforward shots of players perched awkwardly on the balcony, offering no sense of the grandeur of the building, frustratingly hinted at through glimpses off the balcony and revealed most fully through the resonance of the various sound recordings. The images of solo laptop performers are particularly dreary. Musically too, apart from the consistent echo, the blips, squirts, rattles and whines from all manner of indeterminate sources all fall flat in a mess of confusion. I’m reminded of the MIMEO performance at the architectural pavilion in Hyde Park in 2003, a similar event which resulted in a wonderful 3 CD + booklet release; perhaps Applebaum could have done something similar here, selecting a number of the finer performances and releasing a box set, making others available online…?
The documentary however is much more interesting, showing Applebaum in his – very lavish – home, surrounded by walls of records, books, artifacts and his own visual artworks. Brian Ferneyhough is among the many interviewed to weigh in on the importance of the score, praising the indeterminate / multi-disciplinary nature of the work which, as seen in the animated section featuring scrolling panels, is gorgeous. Dots, arrows, lines and symbols link and cross in all directions, and one can easily imagine enterprising musicians really getting stuck into these ‘instructions’. A troublesome document then of what must have involved some truly engaging live performances.
Joshua Meggitt
