Learn to Play Recorder

Lesson 73: Contemporary Work, Part 1 — Reading Modern Notation

  • Recognise and decode the four most common modern-notation conventions for recorder: proportional time, time-bracket / aleatoric notation, graphic notation, and extended-technique symbols.
  • Read a passage of contemporary recorder music and identify which conventions are in play before attempting to perform it.
  • Distinguish what is fixed in the score from what the performer chooses.
  • Lessons 55–56 — extended techniques.
  • Access to published contemporary recorder scores (Linde, Berio, Hirose, Cage, van Hauwe).
  • Proportional and time-bracket notation.
  • Graphic notation.
  • Fixed vs performer-choice elements.

A modern score is half instruction, half invitation. Tell them apart before you play.

Lessons 55 and 56 covered the techniques contemporary recorder composers use — flutter, glissando, multiphonics, whisper tones, harmonics. This lesson is about how those techniques and the rest of the contemporary recorder idiom are written down. The conventions are not stable: every composer's score uses a slightly different vocabulary, and the first job of a player encountering a new contemporary work is to learn the score's particular dialect.

This and the next two lessons are not about acquiring more technique. They are about reading well, choosing well, and collaborating well — the three competences that separate a player who can read Baroque from one who can play living music.

Convention 1 — proportional notation

In proportional notation, the horizontal distance between note-heads represents duration. There is no fixed pulse and no time signature. A note placed twice as far to the right of the previous note lasts twice as long. The performer reads space instead of beats.

Examples: Berio's Sequenza series; many of Hans Martin Linde's solo pieces; most of the second-generation contemporary repertoire.

Practice: read the score with a stopwatch the first time. Time the silences. Time the long notes. Internalise the proportions; only then play it without the stopwatch.

Convention 2 — time-bracket / aleatoric notation

Time-bracket notation gives a duration range for a passage (e.g. “between 8 and 12 seconds”) and lets the player choose where, within that range, the events fall. The pitches are usually fixed; the rhythm is not.

Examples: John Cage's number pieces; Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening-related scores; many improvisation-based works by living composers.

The player's job: choose. Plan the timing in rehearsal so the bracket is filled coherently; the bracket is not an invitation to randomness.

Convention 3 — graphic notation

Graphic notation replaces conventional pitch and rhythm symbols with shapes, curves, colours, or pictograms. A rising curve means a glissando upward; a black box means dense activity; a thin line means a sustained tone. The score functions as a visual prompt rather than a pitch-and-rhythm instruction.

Examples: Cornelius Cardew's Treatise; Anestis Logothetis; the post-war European avant-garde. Most contemporary recorder players will encounter graphic notation rarely — but when they do, the score must be read for its visual logic, not for pitches that are not there.

Convention 4 — extended-technique symbols

The techniques from Lessons 55 and 56 each have a notational convention. The most common:

  • Flutter tongue: three short slashes through the stem, or the abbreviation flz.
  • Glissando: a wavy or straight line between two notes, sometimes with gliss.
  • Multiphonic: stacked noteheads with a specific fingering written above the staff in a diagram or in numbers.
  • Whisper tone: small noteheads, sometimes labelled w.t., sometimes a passage labelled whisper tones at the start.
  • Harmonic: a small circle above the note (the same symbol classical string and wind players use for natural harmonics).

Read every legend on every new score. Composers do not always use the standard symbols; some invent their own.

What is fixed; what you choose

The most useful question to ask of any modern score before performing it:

  • Are the pitches fixed?
  • Are the durations fixed?
  • Are the dynamics fixed?
  • Are the techniques fixed?
  • Is the order fixed?

The answers vary by piece. A Berio Sequenza fixes pitch and ranges of duration and lets the player choose phrasing. A graphic-notation piece may fix nothing but a duration. Until you know which boxes are ticked, you cannot rehearse the piece.

Drill — read three scores

This lesson has no notation snippets of its own. Instead, find published scores of any three of the following pieces (any music library has them) and spend fifteen minutes reading each before attempting to play any:

  • Hans Martin Linde, Music for a Bird — mostly conventional notation with extended-technique symbols.
  • Luciano Berio, Gesti — proportional notation, dense extended-technique passages.
  • Ryohei Hirose, Meditation — mixed proportional and conventional.
  • John Cage, any number piece for recorder (e.g. One13 or similar) — time-bracket notation.
  • Walter van Hauwe, studies from The Modern Recorder Player — published fingering charts for multiphonics.

For each piece, name the conventions used and the boxes (pitch / duration / dynamics / technique / order) that are fixed before you sit down to play.

Now play these

No library piece on this site uses contemporary notation conventions; this is consistent with the site's curriculum focus on the Baroque and Renaissance repertoire. The recommended works above are the application pieces for the next three lessons.

When you can read three contemporary scores aloud (out loud, in time, before you play them) and tell another player which boxes the score has fixed and which it has left to you, move on to Lesson 74.