Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[David Bellows <>]

Hello everyone,

I know this isn't the Morton Feldman mail list but I was hoping
someone here might be able to help anyway.

I'm doing a project where I generate some music using something that
is based on Feldman's graph notation where the location of a box
(high, medium or low) indicates the pitch range and the width
indicates duration.

What I'm wondering is if he ever used this notation for vocal works
and what it looked like? My piece is for a vocalist using this
notation. I've come up with a solution but it doesn't feel ideal so I
was hoping Feldman might have done something better.

Alternatively, if anyone has suggestions for how to include the lyrics
into the score I'm all ears. I'm attaching my current approach. The
lyrics are in the boxes (often they extend past them). The height of
the text within the box does not mean anything and is done solely for
readability when the durations end up being really short. So the
lyrics cycle through from top to middle to bottom (starting over at
each new line) which hopefully helps the vocalist figure out what
comes next.

And I know my version of Feldman's notation doesn't look exactly like
his but I am limited by my poor programming skills and this was the
best I could do that I could handle being generated automatically
using a wide variety of parameters.

The lyrics are from a Gertrude Stein poetry generator I created. And
Connor Gibbs is the person who is going to sing this.

Thanks,
Dave Bellows
www.platonicmusicengine.com

Attachment: Connor_Gibbs_Voice_Feldman_Graph.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document