re:Odysee
After the Second World War, musical practice, following the evolution of the visual arts, adopted a renegade stance that moved away from the musical tradition that had prevailed until then. The palette of sonic possibilities was radically enriched - incorporating electronic sounds and noise - and the new theories and techniques were followed by equally radical changes in musical notation.
Composers had created their own individual ways of notating their thoughts, and this generation of experimentalists was developing a new interest in the organisational potential of every parameter of sound. From 1951 onwards, the role of the performer and listener became increasingly important in the conception of various works. Some of these new approaches were received as functional and essential to the evolution of music as a practice; others, however, were criticised as extreme and exaggerated.
Anestis Logothetis
Anestis Logothetis was an Austrian composer of Greek origin. In the late 1950s, he began to develop his own system of graphic notation, based on the twelve-tone technique and serial techniques, which allowed him to produce sound characters and noises in an improvised way.
Logothetis' impulse to create a new and different musical notation stemmed from the problems facing music in his time. In his words: "In this way, the range of musical modes of expression is significantly enlarged. However, the notation with which the sound events are to be described is unsuitable. Several problems arise from this: not only can noisy sounds only be represented with great effort or, in some cases, not at all, but the desire for flowing music whose genesis can be experienced again and again is impossible to realise in this way".
Considering, therefore, that the musical material was permeated with new sound possibilities, Logothetis tried to find a way to include in the notation some additional parameters of sound, such as the temporal parameter of the musical structure, the positioning of sound in space, the timbre that the quality of noise can reach, and the homogenised flow of sound masses. Due to these additional parameters, this graphic notation system was more flexible and polymorphic than the traditional one. Moreover, the composer tried somehow to protect, on the one hand, the uniqueness of each performance and, on the other hand, the preservation of the principles of a piece by giving the musicians the designated flexibility (during the performance).*
"What fundamentally differentiates graphic notation from traditional notation is the aforementioned polymorphism, which clearly allows all performers to retain their subjective reaction times. The composer takes into account the divergences of the various performers when composing and expects a certain degree of surprise through the new formalisation of the musical form in each performance".Odysee
The central feature of Logothetis' graphic notation is that the sound is spatially arranged on the surface of a sheet of paper, thus determining the structure and the final flow of the piece.
The outline on a sheet of paper guarantees the overview of the whole form [of the musical piece]. Each detail is constructed thanks to the spontaneity of the moment and its contrapuntal processing, its polymorphism. It underlies the process of the sound event from the inflexible graphic situation to a flexible [situation] of sound.
In the case of Odysee (1963), the composer treats space on a micro-scale, aiming to express the adventures of Ulysses. Odysee combines movement and sound through the decoding of the graphic space by the performers traced in the score. Thus, the multiple adventures of Ulysses are visually "sonified" through the personal interpretation of the instrumentalists. The main score describing different psychological states related to Ulysses' adventures (island of Circe, island of the lotus eaters, the Cyclops, etc.) is complementary to the second transparency indicating the movement of the instrumentalists to trace their own Odysee.
In a first attempt to "read" Odysee's (1963) graphic score we can interpret some of the sound graphics as pictorial descriptions of Ulysses' adventures, but also as deeper psychological states into which the performers could enter. This interpretation of the graphic score could be seen as a psychological journey towards maturity, as described by the great Greek poet Constantinos Kavafis in his poem Ithaca.
Through this psychodynamic interpretation of visual graphics and their sonification the performers enter into an evolutionary adventure of the person situated in space and time.*
* Both texts are extracts of the paper “Towards a decodification of the graphical scores of Anestis Logothetis (1921-1994). The graphical space of Odysee (1963).” by Baveli Maria-Dimitra and Georgaki Anastasia.
re:Odysee
re: Odyssee is a composition based on the score of Odyssee by Logothetis. In it, a sound interpretation of the figures drawn in the main score is reproduced in a hexaphonic sound system. In addition, arrows on the floor invite visitors to walk through the space in a certain way and at a certain tempo, matching their location with the sounds of the composition. This work, supervised by the artist Hans Peter Kuhn, was presented at the electroacoustic laboratory of the Berlin University of the Arts.
(For a better experience, the use of headphones is recommended)