If you let the words space and notation sink in, the first thing that comes to mind is space, perhaps even the infinite space of the world, and then the attempt to notate it, to record it, the attempt to define space, so to speak.
However, the term actually comes from New Music, the classical music of the post-war period. Back then, in the 50s and 60s, composers tried by all means to say goodbye to pre-war traditions. German composers and artists in particular, who had suffered the trauma of “degenerate art”, finally wanted to break out of the rigid academic conventions.
Space notation is one such attempt. A classical notation consists of pitches, pitch values, accidentals, etc., which are all arranged neatly and clearly in bars. Its intention is to define a piece as precisely as possible using these parameters in order to ensure the most accurate performance by the performer. This tight harness was perceived by many composers almost as a dictatorship inherent in the score and so many experimented with a hybrid form between free improvisation and the determination of at least a temporal or spatial sequence of events. This is where space notation comes into play: it defines a space with the help of certain symbols and a timeline and gives the performer the freedom to play their sound within this time window. Anyone who has seen such scores quickly realizes that they strongly resemble drawings or graphic paintings.
The painter Bernhard Paul is known for being inspired by works of new music and contemporary music. He has already created paintings for compositions by Steve Reich, John Cage, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Georg Friedrich Haas and many others. For the collection “space notation II” he presents paintings from the series “agens” and “prelude”.
Text: Alexander F. Müller