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First draw it, than play it. The rest is free-form. Playful approach to a milestone experimental invention.
Preparation
Have drawing utensils, pieces of paper, and toy instruments or other sound sources.
Gameplay instruction (option)
This idea for a structure might work well for about 10 players. First establish your alphabet: every participant draws a symbol on the left of their horizontally placed piece of paper. Then one by one all the symbols are explained by their proposers. In the process, the ensemble establishes the alphabet the particular graphic notation used for this game. If you have few players, everyone sets two symbols.
While proposing sounds take care that the description is broad enough to let everyone play the described sound (no instruments/voices are excluded). You are allowed to modify signs in the process. It's good to make a particular symbol wider if it's supposed to take longer time than others and vice versa so signs might be graphically adjusted for duration when all are known.
Everyone fills their piece of paper with symbols from the agreed set, and later performs their piece as they see fit.
Game end
Game ends when everyone played all their symbols.
Notes
The proposals might go in two directions, educationally it's good to use both:
- let a player draw something and then think how it should sound, or
- player imagines a sound and ascribes the notation that fits to the sound.
Variants
There are many possibilities of structuring the drawing-playing experience as for composition and performance. Here are some more examples:
- Makoto Nomura's Shogi Composition (1999) — where composition process is set as a game and is separate from performance. The process helps to achieve coherence in the piece.
- Players might be tasked with playing drawings — possibily similarly to Relay piece from Great Learning Orchestra's collection (but not for classical notation in this case).
- Steve Treseler in his Creativity Triggers for Musicians proposes an exchange (Treseler 2017, 17):
Divide into two or more groups, and ask each group to sketch pictures and/or symbols to structure an improvised piece. Swap drawings, discuss strategies for interpreting the scores, and perform for one another.
- Unstructured playfulness is fun too.
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alias: Draw It Yourself / Graphic Scores