The Song Books by the sound artist Rolf Julius (born in 1939) consist of several bound sheets of Japanese paper, of which each sheet is marked by a different kind of spot.[1] These red or black spots are prints of the processed photographs of color pigment clusters. Julius had already used these types of pigment clusters in earlier sound art installations, combining them with different sounds. There were similar sheets in his Piano Piece No. 1 (1998), whose title indicates that they can be performed musically.[2] It would hardly be possible to detect this solely on the basis of their visual form. According to Erhard Karkoschka, Julius’s musical graphics can therefore be classified as pure musical graphics, that is, as musical graphics without a staff.[3] It must above all be stressed that musical graphics constitute individual solutions to problems with notation as perceived by an artist, and therefore stand out due to their different relationship to conventional notation.
When interpreting musical graphics with so few parameters, which is the case for the Song Books, the performers have to develop a convincing translation for the ambiguous parameters. In the Song Books, the repetition of a similar form—in this case, the various spots—directs the performer’s gaze toward minimal differences, such as the different sizes or fraying of the spots,[4] which are then translated into sound.
The Song Books were performed by the experimental performance ensemble Die Maulwerker in 2004. According to one description, In the realization by The Maulwerker, twelve songbooks lay on a long table. The members of the ensemble picked up, as did visitors to the exhibition beforehand, songbooks, turned their pages, located a situation, and then translated this into sound. While doing so, they were able to move throughout the space. After completing their action, they returned to the table, laid down the book, and picked up a new one or temporarily withdrew. In this way, simultaneous performances overlapping in alternating density were produced, which in their tonal form took on the composition of the books themselves with their overlapping.[5]
[1] Rolf Julius, Song Books 1–6 (premiere performed by Die Maulwerker), Friday, June 18, 2004, at the Heeresbaeckerei, Berlin. Recording: Rolf Julius, Song Books 1–6, performed by Die Maulwerker; recording from July 13, 2004, at the KLANGRAUM-RAUMKLANG-Festival, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Cologne; realization: Rolf Julius. First broadcast on January 1, 2005, at 11:05 p.m. on WDR 3.
[2] See also Melanie Uerling, “Partituren und Musikreste,“ in MaerzMusik: Programmbuch 2006, ed. Berliner Festspiele (Saarbrücken, Germany: Pfau, 2006), 56–59.
[3] Erhard Karkoschka, Notation in New Music; a Critical Guide to Interpretation and Realisation, trans. Ruth Koenig (New York: Praeger, 1972).
[4] Cf. Rolf Julius, “Über Notation,” in MaerzMusik: Programmbuch 2006, ed. Berliner Festspiele, 101–103.
[5] Volker Straebel in the program (in German), available online at http://www.advanced-music.com/translation/julius.htm (accessed August 11, 2010).
