If you're looking for really innovative American music that's somewhat off the beaten path, composer/musicologist Kyle Gann's blog is the place to find it. In this recent post he talks about how much his career has focused on works (his and others) that push the limits of musical notation and challenge our established ideas of what constitutes a score. Like many of Gann's posts, this one is full of audio clips and musical examples.
One of the themes of my life has become something I never expected. I've based some large part of my career around documenting recent music not adequately represented by its score notation. It stared with Narcarrow. His scores contain all of his notes, of course, but many of them, especially the late player piano studies, don't provide as much explicit rhythmic notation as is actually inherent.
He goes on to recount his reconstructions of works by Dennis Johnson and Harold Budd, often working from minimal materials and recordings (you can read the original posts here and here), discuss performance issues with the music of Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley, Mikel Rouse, and Glenn Branca, and describe how the notation issue impacts his composition students.
The truth is, traditional music notation is at best never an entirely efficient transmitter of an imagined musical sound object. The participation of the composer is omitted at everyone's peril. The other truth is, music is not necessarily an imagined sound object (though in academia it is often as only that). Often it is the result of a process, and emerges only in a rehearsal. And the intense conformity to expectation involved in learning to make a detailed conventional classical score is a great reiner-in of imagination and individuality.
I can see how conventional notation could be a "reiner-in" of creativity. When grading orchestration assignments last fall I was always surprised at how even minute deviations in notation leapt off the page. Knowing how most performers react to idiosyncratic performing materials can't help either. It's a lot to chew on, and the full post is well worth the read.
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