Compose Your Own Adventure
I found this post in the Opinionator by composer Jason Freeman. He noticed that only 12.6 percent of Americans play a musical instrument once a year, and he suspects that people create music with less frequency. I don't know if that's true, especially with the advent of digital technologies enabling the layman to compose something via Garageband, etc., but he created a new way to experience one of his compositions.
Jason wrote a piece entitled Piano Etudes (2009) that uses a similar open-score cell format that Terry Riley used in In C.
In “Piano Etudes” (2009), I use technology to make the open score accessible not only to performers but also to audiences, inviting everyone to experience and participate in the work’s creative process. I notated these four short piano pieces as sets of musical fragments connected by arrows. The structure is reminiscent of a choose-your-own-adventure novel, of a flow chart, or of the hyperlinked structure of the Internet. Each version of the piece simply …
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