This is the score I put together for the Scratch Music orchestra I’ve been meeting up with the past couple weeks.

We went through it last week. I had decided that I didn’t want to provide any kind of interpretation for the group or take an authorly meaning-making role, because I was curious about how people would interpret the numbers.

We ended up coming up with two interpretations as a group:

The first read the numbers as a sort of metric—the drummer played a consistent beat, and in the number of beats specified by the right side of the column, each of us had to play the number of notes specified in the left side. So, a general density of notes could be heard, but nothing intentionally tonal. The persistent drumbeat ended up sounding a little too martial and dirge-like, so we tried another approach.

The second divided the group into two halves who divided the range of their instruments into six. “1” was the lowest you could play (or thereabout) and “6” the highest. One half took the left side of each column, and one half took the right, and we advanced through the rows on a signal from the drummer. Once we got to the bottom right corner, the drummer played a killer solo and we read it backwards, with the halves switching columns. This one was more fun to play, I think, yet still quite cacophonous.

I think someone was taking audio recordings, but I don’t know if/when they’ll be online.

Oh yeah, and the numbers are just arbitrary.

(via Eve Essex)

update: There is a nice variety of other scores to check out over at Eve’s blog.