2____Aboutness

The convention of the programme note, or the liner notes, the so-called paratexts[1]^⁠ of the work is a way meaning is bestowed on a work from the outside. This, arguably, comes from a time (the 19^th century) when music takes inspiation from literature, and where narrativity is prioritised over classical structural principles.The practice of storytelling through music, or creating metaphoric relationships with words, appeared to fade during the 20th century, amid the rise of modernist abstraction. However, it could be argued that it has now reemerged in a different form.

In an age where visual media have become so dominant, the narrative, the or the aboutness can be expressed in a non-verbal way, between different modes of expression. The cross-modal metaphors^⁠ created between the sound world and any other media that are referenced in a piece of music is one of the ways where meaning is generated; and one can say that through the opening up of music to media beyond the word, the metaphors have become richer and more complex— maybe even more immediate.

This might take the form of words that describe the music in terms of things in the world, situations, or emotions.  The intra- or extra-musical ideas in a work are reference points where the representational is summoned, where aspects or the real world or lived experience is conjured up. In a media score this is not only something that is given by the context of the programme note, but something that might be experienced in the entirety of the work, because it is presented in a medium that runs parallel to the music, or in the very notation itself. These scores carry a strong sense of aboutness - their aboutness is foregrounded.

Aboutness is a term found in philosophy that is closely tied to the concept of intentionality.  According to Stephen Yablo:

 “Aboutness is the relation that meaningful items bear to whatever it is that they are on or of or that they address or concern[2]⁠.”

In philosophy this term is not as straightforward as common sense would assume, because it gets caught up in differences between the mental and physical worlds, or as the philosopher Baruch Spinoza would define, between thought and extension. Raymond Tallis explains it thus:

“How do I see this cup in front of me? The physical side of the story is that some of the light bouncing off the cup enters my eyes, tickles up my retinas, and sets in train neural activity terminating in and processed by the visual cortex. Is that the whole story? It doesn’t seem so. While the continuous causal connection between the cup and my brain describes how the light gets in, it hardly explains how the gaze looks out[3].”

In essence, "aboutness" in philosophy can be described as the way the subject both connects to and separates from the object. This concept emphasizes the critical distance required to make sense of the world—and the art object. It is a valuable framework when discussing the power of a work to convey its subject matter. Is this relationship prioritized in music? For many types of music, one might argue that concrete representational imagery is often avoided. However, in music enriched by its relationship to other media or ideas that suggest alternative perspectives on listening, aboutness fosters an awareness of the metaphorical connections between media.

Aboutness can manifest in various ways within a work or its score. Beyond the paratexts mentioned earlier, the visual presentation—whether performative or through the use of visual media—can shape how one listens to or experiences the work. The examples below illustrate how visual and audio elements challenge both musicians and audiences to engage with the work in new and distinct ways.

Screen Play by Christian Marclay thrives on this relation. Here, found film footage is combined with computer graphics to create a visual projection interpreted by live musicians. Because the film is visible to both musicians and audience, a cinematic relation is created where there is an expectation on the musicians to play or subvert the tropes of film music. The added graphical element of lines and shapes drawn over the found footage reminds us that we are not watching a film, but a score for musicians. The aboutness here is embedded in every shot of film, where a narrative is suggested, and the relation between images has a playful and deliberate logic. Marclay chooses footage that already has an inherent sonic suggestion: It begins with a ticking clock, the breaking of waves, the wheels of an old car on a bumpy road, a fire spreading through an apartment block. These images invite sonification, but how far should the musician go in illustrating them? Achieving the balance between the sound conjured in the mind by the images and the sound created by the musicians seems to be the central key to the piece.

“Moving images and graphics gives musicians visual cues suggesting emotion, energy, rhythm, pitch, volume, and duration. I believe in the power of images to evoke sound.” [4]

Stills from Christian Marclay's Screen Play showing sampled images with the graphic overlay suggesting musical interpretation.

One could argue that the musician must navigate three distinct levels of information in this context. First, the film footage, which invites the musician to create a soundtrack, illustrating and responding to the silent film. Second, the graphical elements, whose grammar of dots and lines evokes traditional musical notation and encourages the exploration of a more musical logic. Finally, the musician must listen to and interact with the other performers on stage, balancing these layers in real-time.

Another work that defines how musicians interact with sonic and score material in an entirely unconventional way is Annea Lockwood’s Jitterbug (2007). Originally commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, it has since been performed as an independent concert work. The piece merges visual and auditory score elements, immersing both musicians and audiences in the ecosystem of a river and the natural world. The musicians interpret photographs of Montana creek-bed rocks taken by Gwen Deely as graphic scores. These images guide performers by representing horizontal and vertical layers in terms of time and texture. Each image is assigned an equal duration within the performance, which the players navigate by entering or overlapping at their discretion.

Two photographs of rocks by Gwen Deely, used as scores in Annea Lockwood’s Jitterbug.

As opposed to Marclay’s score Lockwood prefers not to have these images projected for the audience:

“The piece is purely aural: the rocks are not projected, in order to avoid the distraction of trying to correlate sound events with visual details[5]^⁠.”

The aural aspect of the piece, which also serves as a guide for the musicians, is a pre-recorded surround-sound score featuring aquatic insect sounds captured in the Flathead Valley, Montana, near where the rock photographs were taken. The soundscape possesses an almost microscopic quality, magnifying the normally inaudible insect sounds to massive proportions. This amplification highlights the fragility and magnificence of the organisms and invertebrates inhabiting the river and its surroundings.

The combination of visual and auditory scores in Jitterbug profoundly shapes the material that the musicians perform. The visceral and, at times, immersive river hydrophone recordings invite the musicians to explore a non-human mode of expression. The juxtaposition of the photographs—meditating on the thousands to millions of years it took for rock layers to form—with the ephemerality of the recordings of river sounds places the musicians in a poetic limbo, negotiating between these contrasting material and temporal states.

Excerpt from Annea Lockwood's Jitterbug recorded by Ensemble Maze on Moving Furniture Records.

Both media scores referenced above convey a specific aboutness that extends beyond the title or concept of the works, or at least engage in a metaphoric relationship with their paratexts. In this way, one might say that the overall sense of aboutness permeating a work is continuously intertwined with all the semantic and sensory aspects of its creation. This quality informs the musicians' approach to improvised material, while providing the audience with a distinctive perspective on the interplay between different media.

Most of my own work thrives on these metaphoric relationships, trying to generate meaning between the various media.  Specifically, how hierarchies shift between auditive, visual and textual. Trench Code (2015), commissioned by Brugge Concertgebouw for the anniversary of the 1^st World War, plays on these shifts of hierarchy. It consists of 3 interactive videos, which act as scores and instruments for an open ensemble. Each video is based on a particular code book used in the trenches, presented in a graphic form and encoded into musical material. A communication system is set up amongst the ensemble, utilising the vocabulary and codes found in the three trench code books. The scores are partly computer generated, though always relying on the encoding of the text as it appears in the books, and on the operation of a score-player[6]. 

The piece utilizes three code books: The Mohawk Code (US, 1918), Schlüsselheft (Germany, 1917), and the BAB Code Book (UK, 1917). Each book is translated into an audiovisual media score, played back through custom Java software, and inhabits its own distinct sonic and visual world, reflecting the unique characteristics of the original code books. For example, The Mohawk Code, based on a 1918 trench code book issued by the American Expeditionary Forces, is divided into two main sections: one for encoding messages and another for decoding them. In this score, the entire "decoding" section is used as a dataset, with its content encoded into the graphics according to specific rules.

Images from the generated score of Mohawk (Trench Code).

In Schlüsselheft, the “Buchstabenzeichen” (letter character) encodings of the 'Algemeine Verkehrszeichen' (general traffic signs) are translated to lines on images of trench maps of the time.

Images from the generated score of Schlüsselheft (Trench Code).

Because these scores, which consist of images, texts, and sounds, are seen by the audience as well as the musicians, the subject matter, the source, the aboutness, of the work is fully present.

Exceprt from Trench Code performed by Maze, Splendor. Full video here.

Next: Transparency