Introduction
Grove Music Online defines notation as being either representative – ‘a visual analogue of musical sound, either as a record of sound heard or imagined’ – or prescriptive – ‘a set of visual instructions for performers’.Footnote 1 One might question how either definition is relevant to spontaneous music-making that conjures up a ‘piece’ before an audience's ears and eyes without any obvious recourse to a score. The work and practice of the record label and collective ‘Instant Composer's Pool’ (ICP), and of the improvising musicians Moss Freed and Sarah Brand, addresses possible relationships between notation and improvisation. In 2019 I interviewed Freed, Brand and the ethnomusicologist Floris Schuiling who has conducted extensive research on the ICP, and the results were broadcast in a programme on Deutschlandradio Kultur in December 2020.Footnote 2 While these examples reveal what kinds of relationships are possible, for each musician they are ongoing and may even have developed somewhat since 2019.
These interviews featured five recurring themes: non-idiomatic music; the influence the musicians have on the sound of the music; improvisation as a method of composition; scores that make processes visible; and para-notation. The first is Derek Bailey's famous formulation of ‘non-idiomatic’ music as the primary term with which free improvisation is associated. For Bailey, non-idiomatic music eschews previous influences or stylistic models, since it ‘has no prescribed idiomatic sound. The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it.’Footnote 3 Bailey combines ‘prescription’ and ‘pre-determined sound’ as concepts that are essential to notation, but inimical to a free improvisation, and this explains why Bailey and the musicians with whom he worked were often so averse to including notation in their practice. The latter part suggests how this music contributes towards building communities and cultures. The architect Lawrence Halprin offers a related, if contrary position: ‘In the planning of communities a score visible to all the people allows each one of us to respond, to find our own input, to influence before decisions are made. Scoring makes the process visible.’Footnote 4 Given my interest in the role that notation can play, Halprin suggests the existence of a notation that may suggest and instigate democratic, participatory and collaborative practices.
Paolo de Assis’ definition of para-notation as: ‘the totality of words, signs, and symbols encountered on the road to a concrete performance of music’,Footnote 5 can be added to the two definitions with which I began. While de Assis writes as a performer/researcher of Western Classical repertoire, Christopher Williams identifies how transferable his understanding of para-notation is to research that investigates relationships between notation and improvisation. A continuum between improvisation and composition can be found in Richard Barrett's definition of notation: ‘I define musical notation as a medium of (graphic) communication between composer and performer[…] A second definition arises from the fact that I don't oppose composition and improvisation: instead, I view improvisation as a method of composition, one which is characterised by spontaneous musical actions and reactions.’Footnote 6 Barrett identifies further qualities of improvisation that ‘[…] as a method of musical creation […] the framework itself is brought into being at the time of performance, rather than existing in advance of it’. As a consequence, ‘[t]he possibility of improvising the structural-expressive framework of a piece of music comes into being, I think, as a direct consequence of the realisation that any sound may be combined with any other sound in a musical context.’Footnote 7 This activity of improvising the ‘expressive-structural framework’ can be seen in the work and practice of the ICP, in their search for instant, or spontaneous composition.
The ICP and Floris Schuiling
The research of Dutch ethnomusicologist Floris Schuiling addresses the role that improvisation, notation and technology has in musical creativity. While focusing on Dutch music history, Schuiling's publications encompass music since 1945, jazz, experimental and popular music and include The Instant Composers Pool and Improvisation Beyond Jazz.Footnote 8 In my interview with Schuiling he describes how the ICP's practices developed as a critical response to Bailey's ‘non-idiomatic music’ and how the ‘living archive’ of scores that each performer possesses reveals practices of ongoing para-notation, practices that move beyond definitions of notation as representation or prescription.
AZ: How and when was the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) formed?
FS: They were founded in 1967 by Micha Mengelberg (pianist and composer), Willem Broeker (clarinet, saxophone player and composer) and Han Beninnk (drummer). Micha and Han had played together since around 1960, they were part of a successful jazz quartet. They invited Willem to become a member, but then the group fell apart, because they [Mengelberg and Beninnk] were interested in free improvisation and the others weren't. They founded the ICP and now they mainly perform as the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra. In all that time, it has been many different things: a political interest group for improvising musicians, or a collective under which several different groups operate, but it has always been a record label where they release their music as well as associated acts.
AZ: What is the difference between the orchestra and the collective?
FS: Since the beginning, they started out as a kind of interest group – campaigning to the government for funding for improvising musicians – and that helped build a community of improvising musicians in the Netherlands. Anyone they asked to join their collective became part of a pool allowing them to perform in any kind of line-up. If you went to an ICP concert around 1970, you wouldn't necessarily know who would be performing.
Since around 1980 they felt that either their political action had been mostly successful, or it had been taken over by other organisations and so it became a more specific group. Since Willem Broeker had already left, Micha remained as the unofficial leader and had always written material for the group. When it started calling itself the ICP it really became the main vehicle for his composition.
AZ: You write about the influence that Duke Ellington had on the work of the young Micha Mengelberg, especially the story where Duke Ellington gave the music to his musicians shortly before they took the stage, is that the approach to notation you were referring to?
FS: I had meant something less specific. Micha had always been a great fan of Duke Ellington's work, especially the consequences of what you just mentioned, not only giving the musicians the parts, or set list, shortly before the concert but also with writing materials for particular musicians. All this played an important role in his fascination for Duke Ellington.
AZ: What is meant by instant composition, what does it mean for the ICP, and does the definition change over time?
FS: Yes I think so; there are a couple of different meanings. The most obvious one is the idea that improvisers are not just doing something random, they think musically about what they are doing and compose both in the moment and with each other. In the 1960s this term became useful in making clear that what they were doing came from a compositional mindset. This is probably the most important meaning.
Another meaning, given the context of the 1960s, is a more facetious reference to instant coffee and all kinds of popular instant products. Like fast food, the name ICP has a kind of pop art element to it; their use of slogans on their posters creates an absurdist and commercial aspect. I did find a 3rd meaning: in the early 1960s, Micha participated in the Fluxus movement and performed in a couple of Fluxus events together with the poet Thomas Schmidt. In the 1960s Schmidt was working on ‘instant poetry’. Schmidt emptied out jam-jars and filled them with ink, ash, or pieces of paper with words written on. Each jar had a label on them: ‘shake well before reading’. The idea was that you could shake the jar, and whatever came out would be instant poetry.
I found this reference interesting because ICP orchestra concerts (whether in the 1970's or now) present a kind of collage of the compositions that Micha wrote for the group. It's almost as if a selection of their repertoire were put into a jar and shook well to produce their concert set. Different bits of repertoire are combined, and improvisation helps create transitions between. This particular connection gave me an insight into their working methods and how they challenge the traditional understanding of improvisation – even more than the idea of improvisation being a form of ‘composing in the moment’.
AZ: Somewhere you mention how each musician's folder become more personalised the more the music is marked up and rewritten before each concert…
FS: As far as I know there is no ‘archive’ of the repertoire of the ICP (or not yet at least). You're right that the musicians – and some have been members for decades now – have compiled these folders over time. Any contents of one person's folder will be quite different from someone else's.
Before each concert, someone makes a set list – this used to always be Micha, but he stopped doing that at some point – the musicians start looking through their folders to see if they have a copy of the music on the set list. This can be frustrating as the musicians often dislike constantly having to check to see if the music is there. If anybody needs to copy anything or if anyone has a different arrangement of the same tune, they just sort of figure out what they're going to do very briefly before each concert. Their concert participation depends on how they bring together all the different parts and scores they all have in their folders.
AZ: I find this concept interesting: every concert is a snapshot in the life of this living archive. How practical is this?
FS: Some arrangements are from the early 1980s where there was still a tuba player; at other points they had two cellists; instead of a violinist there may have been an extra clarinet player. As a consequence, many of the instrumentations for these pieces are outdated: this problem has to be worked out on the spot. This is often very impractical and frustrating. However, this is their working method, and part of the excitement comes from the fact of their challenging each other and in inventing different ways to play these outdated arrangements. On some pages the print has disappeared as a result of having been copied hundreds of times. Since all these issues are part of a complex living archive, it would take more time and effort to rewrite the music in neat – and they would never do that! This describes their approach to performance and improvisation.
AZ: Tobias Delius (saxophonist with the ICP) sees an emergent potential of this usage of notation in its guiding a player towards more diverse solutions and freeing them from repeated, idiomatic or even ‘safer’ playing patterns. In an interview with Schuiling, Delius explains:
The purpose of the written material is to disrupt a ‘nice flow’ of improvisation. It can create more anarchy than improvisation sometimes… The compositions play their own part.Footnote 9 […] So with respect to musical form, some groups have clear models they work with, but I'm more interested in how are we going to get this ship back to shore, or on the rocks or whatever. It can be great being in a situation where you feel very comfortable, but it is very important not to be comfortable sometimes.Footnote 10
AZ: I am interested in the potential for notation to build a culture. Tobias Delius describes how a particular form of anarchy emerges, as if notation had a certain ‘agency’. Can you describe how this agency produces idiosyncratic behaviours and performative interactions?
FS: Over time, a great number of methods have been developed to deconstruct the music they have in front of them. For example, the band might be playing a certain piece, and after a while somebody starts playing a solo. You can often see either the musicians in the string or brass section looking at the soloist, and nodding while talking to each other behind their hands. They may then decide to play a passage in the G-clef, and render it as a kind of background texture, or take a series of pitches and play them backwards in an attempt to subvert what the soloist is doing, and so on. Of course, it either works or it does not.
They have these compositions that they call ‘viruses’, that are not necessarily a distinct class of composition but are short pieces that everyone knows. They won't necessarily be featured on the set list but can be initiated by any player. If somebody starts playing one of these viruses everyone will recognise it. The idea, or metaphor, of a virus is where a small musical idea ‘spreads’ and ‘infects’ the group, ‘contaminating’ whatever they had been doing. On the other hand, if it gets ‘contained’ then it has been stopped from spreading, and that's why they called it a virus. That's one of the ways compositions can be used to intervene in what's happening and create new opportunities for improvisation because it derails whatever is going on at that moment, and challenges everyone else to respond to the new and unfolding situation.
To make one further point on this: if you were to give people vague assignments like: ‘just play’, ‘play the colour blue’ or ‘play the emotion sadness’, etc., then you might think that you're providing a lot of freedom, but it can inhibit a player because you haven't provided enough of a task for someone to begin a process of exploration. I believe that is a large part of musical creativity.
AZ: How can these practices be understood in the context of other improvisers working at the same time?
FS: Especially amongst improvisers notation can be dismissed quite easily; I'm reminded of some of Derek Bailey's comments about notation, were he says he'd prefer to not be held to notation, to a composition, or to the views of a composer. For many improvisers the first step towards democratisation means: get rid of the composer. Many improvisers – and this can also be seen in popular music – dismiss notation as something that inhibits creativity, for the good reason of there being a very long tradition of hierarchical thinking about music in which notation is central. However, for the ICP, notation is viewed as a potential source of creativity as it can set certain challenges and ask you to find and work with certain problems, rather than to merely solve them.
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Sarah Brand
The British composer, improviser, trombonist and pedagogue Sarah Brand combines music therapy and improvisation in her teaching practice. As a student she studied composition and improvisation with Veryan Weston and later trained as a music therapist. Brand has recorded and performed jazz and improvised music since the early 1990s with Mark Sanders, John Edwards, Martin Hathaway, Billy Jenkins, Elton Dean, Evan Parker, Phil Minton, Lol Coxhill, Alexander Hawkins, Maggie Nicols, Rachel Musson, Wadada Leo Smith, Jason Yarde, Steve Beresford and many others. Indeed, her most important musical collaborative partnership, with the drummer Mark Sanders, has lasted over 20 years.Footnote 11 The mixture of concepts derived from music therapy and improvisation is both compelling and unique. Brand's thinking relates closely to ideas articulated by Schuiling but she adds transcription, analysis and discussion to the process of refining and sharpening awareness while improvising.
Sarah Brand (SB): I got into playing improvised music because I found that I was playing music that was expressing me, my musical will and the ‘will of the people’ rather than something that had been mapped out by somebody else.Footnote 12 I then trained as a music therapist which essentially uses improvisation to communicate with vulnerable people who don't need to be musically minded specifically – but music therapists do. Since 2003 then I have become a trainer of music therapists, and I specialise in teaching how to improvise.
AZ: In your research you analyse and evaluate improvisation from an interrelational perspective where music therapy provides the main theoretical framework. What were your main impressions when applying these theories?
SB: The relationships people had amongst each other seemed to me to impact how they played, what they played and why they played. They weren't just responding to a sound and then translating that into another sound. Part of how they felt about that sound, and about the person playing it, seemed to greatly influence how they actually played.
I have had very long-term musical relationships with three particular musicians that featured in my research, and are on my album,Footnote 13 particularly Mark Sanders the drummer. I wanted to look at both the relational aspects and the inter-relation that went on in our playing. I wanted to find a way of being able to express in words what was going on between me and the musicians I was working with. My music therapy perspective where musical notation is used to try and show relationship (which, by the way, is incredibly difficult) helped inform this approach, and so I wanted to have a crack at it for non-clinical music. The case study with myself and Mark Sanders was deeper because he and I have been long-term friends for twenty-odd years.
AZ: Can you describe the interpersonal processes you identified during improvisation?
SB: Roughly speaking there were four processes going on: attuned response, cross modality, match and resistance. To give you an example of an attuned response: If Mark played a snare hard, I might play a loudish long note, the loud long note might have the same aggressive snap as was expressed by his snare, I would therefore be reflecting the dynamic sound of what he just played (which is different to imitation). In psychology it is called ‘affect attunement’, but I changed it to attuned response. ‘Vitality affect’ is the process where the energy of somebody's sound is responded to, but not necessarily the pitch, the tone or the colour.
With cross modality, someone might play a very high note, and somebody else might play a profoundly low note, or you might have Mark Sanders on the drums banging metal objects really hard, and I might play a very high vibrato sound. Now I'm not copying the sound or the textures, I'm cross-modally reflecting the energy or the force. I found that in improvised music that went on a hell of a lot, especially at the start of improvisations.
Two further processes are ‘match’ – where ideas can be rhythmically or tonally matched – and ‘resistance’ – where we might notice that our playing has become too imitative. I found cyclic patterns emerging in the trio, the duo with Mark and in the full quartet. As tiny as these patterns are, they are clearly audible. My recordings helped me to develop a form of listening; the method of transcription I developed combines unconventional signs with conventional notation.
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In the next section I discuss three short transcriptions of Wintersound, recorded in 2018 by Brand and Sanders at the Canterbury Wintersound festival. My summaries derive from Brand's more detailed account in her Ph.D. thesis and are included here to reveal how concepts derived from music therapy have been applied.Footnote 14 Figures 1–3 show transcriptions of three brief moments, each chosen for their significance in revealing a ‘creative and social relationship’:Footnote 15 1:32–1:37, 1:59–2:14 and 3:15–3:32. Sanders and Brand have developed an oppositional playing style to help generate greater independence of playing. This yields a highly nuanced dynamic interaction: independent moments are either extremely rapid or are heard simultaneously. Formalising the processes of this interplay has proved to be extremely difficult. Improvised recordings are, by their very nature, complex and difficult to transcribe and the results are, at best, an approximation. Brand transcribes melodic phrases and pitches as played; there are no bar lines or time- or key-signatures, and instead a version of space/time notation is employed. Each extract is notated on the traditional five-line system: tonal and pitched material are combined with forms of gestural/graphic notation. Where it appears, the ‘≈’ sign denotes an approximation.
Figure 1: Sarah Brand and Mark Sanders, Wintersound, 1:32 to 1:37 (Festival Wintersound, Canterbury, 2018, used with the author's permission).Footnote 16
Figure 2: Brand and Sanders, Wintersound, 1:59 to 2:14 (used with the author's permission).Footnote 19
Figure 3: Brand and Sanders, Wintersound, 3:15 to 3:32 (used with the author's permission).Footnote 20
In Figure 1 Brand plays three upper register sounds: a sharp and sustained inhalation (SSI) and a squeezed pitch (SP), followed by an accented, or sharp inhalation (SI). Against this a bowed metal bowl crescendos leading to two accents [2, 4] that Brand describes as ‘cross-modal attuned responses’Footnote 17 to the SP [1] and SI [3]. This latter sound is also read as ‘a more assertive attuned response’Footnote 18 to Sanders’ accent.
In Figure 2 a counterpoint emerges due to Sanders’ uneven rhythmic material [6] that constructively resists Brand's long legato phrase [5]. Brand then tonally matches Sanders’ high-pitched bell in the rising 32nd note figure, which is then quickly resisted by Brand. The trill and glissando in the trombone contrast with what Sanders plays. Shortly afterwards, both players resolve this with a brief pause.
In Figure 3 the trombone's tonally matching response to the high c’ [7] in the struck metal bowl is by playing the exact same tone. Immediately afterwards the held tones in the trombone [10 and 11] are understood as constructive resistances to the rattling and scraping bowl sounds [9]. The crescendo played by Brand [12] is an attuned response to the intensity of Sanders’ cymbal scraping. During this final sound [13] Sanders’ cymbal scraping itself becomes louder, which Brand understands as an attuned response to the crescendo in the trombone [12].
Brand's analyses reveal the subtle effects these fleeting processes have on each performer's playing. Brand considers these lively, intuitive and spontaneous exchanges as examples of embodied knowledge, as they leave little time for conscious thought processes.
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AZ: Can you talk more about the function of these transcriptions?
SB: They are transcribed as moments, and there was so much going on that it would be meaningless to show an entire piece in this kind of way. It's not a score, it's not a guide, it's not designed for people to try and repeat. It's supposed to be kind of intuitive map of what's going on. If I were to put this into a graphic score, or any kind of score, and gave it to the guys in the band, it wouldn't sound the same. Despite this, we can recreate what we've done in the past by the iterative process of playing together, and due to our having our own particular sounds. During this analysis I asked myself: before I start looking at how other people affect me, what do I actually do without their impact? and how would I play without their input?
AZ: What did this work teach you about your own playing?
SB: There are about 43 things I do a lot in my playing,Footnote 21 which demystifies the idea that it all comes tumbling out of nowhere: no it doesn't, it comes out of my own vocabulary. These things are triggered and prompted and provoked by others. We all have our own particular vocabulary and, if you are able to use your vocabulary spontaneously, you are in the middle of a good reciprocal exchange.
AZ: Many improvisers are resistant to discussion or analysis of an improvisation, how have other improvisers reacted to this analytic and discursive approach?
SB: I am frustrated by this idea in improvised music, that Derek Bailey says that you shouldn't academicise improvisation, even David Toop said that you have to put these interrelational feelings aside (I'm paraphrasing here) in order to understand what's going on. Well, actually no! I would say that you have to address these ideas in order to understand what's going on, if you put them to one side you are in huge denial about the things that are influencing what we do. After all, it is normal for us to talk about how we affect each other when we play, and I think that has been avoided, and I want to stop avoiding it: I want practitioners to start talking about what they do.
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Sarah Brand's research and the practices of the ICP suggest how musical and social processes may become visible through notation. Moss Freed's work, Micromotives,Footnote 22 for large improvising ensemble, written for his own London-based ensemble Union Division, is a set of six pieces that contain verbal instructions mixed with conventional notation. In addition to the instructions (describing musical situations, playing styles, rhythm and pitches) are a set of hand signs (see Figure 4) for conduction, itself a form of ‘live’ notation. Conduction, as pioneered by Butch Morris, means both to conduct (as conventionally understood) and to ‘conduct electricity’. Simon Fell describes perceptively how the presence of a conductor often becomes counter-productive for a group of improvisers:
Conducted improvisation remains problematic; in the hands of some practitioners the level and rigidity of discipline required renders questionable any meaningful relationship with improvisation (at least on the part of the players rather than the conductor). Its most successful practitioners tend to use smaller vocabularies, have more open ended goals, and are able to resist temptation to over-direct. A key skill for structuring improvising activity (and one which can be very difficult for a composer to acquire) is the ability to relinquish and jettison an idea, no matter how wonderful, elegant, or skilfully crafted, simply because it is no longer appropriate.Footnote 23
Figure 4: Moss Freed, hand signs for Micromotives.
Freed's thinking elegantly anticipates these common pitfalls: each part of Micromotives features conduction opportunities enabling any player to trigger performance processes at any time, such as changing ensembles (duo, trio, quartet, tutti, etc.), changing instruments, exchanging players and ensemble alternation. In January 2023Footnote 24 I attended the Union Division's launch concert for the Micromotives Footnote 25 album at the Vortex, London. The ways in which the ensemble navigate their way through the seemingly infinite number of situations provides for a highly focused and absorbing listening experience. In performance there is a genuine sense of discovery, of new aspects of the musical situations being uncovered as they unfold. The effect is dramatic, even mesmerising, as trios, duos and quartets alternate or change abruptly and ideas dissolve and evolve. My impression was of hearing a music in the process of ongoing invention by a tight-knit community of highly perceptive and excellent musicians.
Moss Freed (MF): Part of this was actually to get away from conduction, in the way that I saw it.Footnote 26 I'd had some not great experiences playing within that environment and, as an improviser, I still struggle a bit with someone being at the front and telling me what to do. Partially this whole work is a reaction against that, but it's interesting that I arrived at the same sorts of ways of coordinating with hand signs. The essential difference is that in Micromotives power is shared: each player can take up that authority at any point, we can gesture to other people and try and get people to do things. There's no one singular person in charge, and that was really important to me.
AZ: Can you talk about the relationship between the improvisers chosen and the music written?
MF: It became increasingly apparent to me that when you're composing for improvisers the first compositional decision you make is which players you get: that has the most profound impact on the sound. In our rehearsals there's probably more discussion than there is playing, it's a very, very social thing, and with improvisers you get strong opinions and ideologies(!). The players would say: this all sounds great, but we rarely get any solo textures, and because there are so many of us (max. 25 players) it's very difficult to get silence. This aspect was raised by band members and listeners, for example, they might say: ‘I'd love to just hear the saxophone play solo for two minutes: that's what I'm missing’. In response to these kinds of comments I introduced a new sign.
The big thing I arrived at in the whole process of writing for improvisers was my realising how much (or little) I can dictate and influence, what kinds and levels of things am I able to point towards in performance whilst allowing people to maintain a high level of freedom, self-identity, personal voice and personal choice. I eventually came to the conclusion that all I can do is point towards something and say: ‘If you want to use some materials, then here are those materials’ – regardless of how guided and determined I had made them. In particular, with my piece ‘Starlings’, the materials are very guided towards achieving a certain affect. At the end of the day, this is all I can do; if I do any more than that, I immediately start limiting the very improvisational freedoms I was eager to maintain.
AZ: In the instructions, there is little mention of how time is considered. In a situation where players are communicating hand signals, how does a player know how long to play for, how might they respond if they are interrupted too soon and how long should a piece be?
MF: I was really taken by something that John Butcher wrote, which I found online: Freedom and Sound, This Time It's Personal.Footnote 27 Butcher writes about the fundamentally different mental or cognitive approach to improvising you would have when you know how long you have to improvise, when you don't know how long you have, and when it is completely open. For example, if you think ‘I've got ten seconds to improvise’ that can often just lead to filling up the space because you're always aware that you're going to be cut-off. This has a profound impact on what you will do. I was concerned to eradicate any sense of how long things might last: a piece may last five minutes, or it can last 45 minutes. That was something that was important for me to hardwire into the thinking behind this work.
As a consequence, my aim is to have created a piece that is all about the individual people involved and how they come together collectively. Hence the name Union Division. It is all about uniting and dividing, and the many different ways that can happen.
Conclusions
There are many more improvisers and composers whose work combines improvisation and notation than could have been discussed here, and some readers may criticise the absence of instructional scores (as in the work of Heather Frasch, Pauline Oliveros and Mathias Spahlinger, among many others), graphic notation (Anthony Braxton, Lauren Redhead, Nina Whiteman, etc.) and other approaches. Nevertheless, I hope that these three case studies demonstrate interesting responses to the governing themes outlined at the beginning of this article.
None of these examples contradict the two main definitions of notation outlined at the beginning, nor the inclusion of para-notation; each example moves freely between definitions, as and when notation is used. Within the ICP, the archive folders are not organised by the band leader, but provide personalised materials for use in concert, rendering performance techniques playful, inventive and often virtuosic. If Moss Freed and the ICP's use of para-notation affords the notation a dynamic agency, Sarah Brand consciously attempts to find a notation that is adequately representative of improvisations after they have happened, these transcriptions becoming the basis for further discussion and playing. Brand's and Freed's score-making provoke discussion and, in Freed's case, triggered the ensemble to organise themselves around an egalitarian ritual of conduction and reaction in performance. Whether representing a fragment (Brand), a plan of the whole (Freed) or archived material for a collage of creative challenges (ICP), these notations allow processes to become visible and potentially transformational for their musicians.
