Notation Rayon Shirt (Natural)

The Inspiration

Amongst the other garments like the Rave Lights Tee, the Notation Rayon Shirt draws a great amount of inspiration from experimental notations and scoring of music in the early to mid 1900s.

The design also heavily draws inspiration from experimental artists and composers like Iannis Xenakis take on an architectural and mathematical approach towards music, creating emotional landscapes that are carefully and intricately designed.

About Iannis Xenakis

In short, Xenakis is a greek composer who was trained as an architect. In his early 20s, he fought against the Communists. During the battle, a shrapnels from the blast of a British tank caused him a horrendous facial injury, leaving him blind in one eye.

After his exile to Paris, he was sentenced to death but it was eventually mitigated to a prison term. After which he returned and eventually became one of the greatest creative figures of the century:

“An architect who trained, worked, and often transcended the inspiration of his mentor and boss, Le Corbusier; an intellectual whose physical and mathematical understanding of the way individual particles interact with each other and create a larger mass - atoms, birds, people, and musical notes - would produce one of the most fertile and prophetic aesthetic explorations in musical history; and above all a composer, whose craggily, joyously elemental music turned collections of pitches and rhythms and instruments into a force of nature, releasing a power that previous composers had only suggested metaphorically but which he would realise with arguably greater clarity, ferocity, intensity than any musician, before or since”

Pithoprakta

Written in 1955, Pithoprakta is considered one of Xenakis’ most formidable work. The piece is written for a string orchestra with 46 separate solo parts. It was premiered by conductor Hermann Scherchen in March 1957.

The word Pithoprakta translates to "actions through probability". This relates to Jacob Bernoulli's law of large numbers which states that as the number of occurrences of a chance event increases, the more the average outcome approaches a determinate end.

The piece is based on the statistical mechanics of gases, Gauss's law, or Brownian motion. Each instrument is conceived as a molecule obeying the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution law, with Gaussian distribution of temperature fluctuation.

Xenakis also designed what he called "polytopes", high-art son-et-lumière installations that involved his lighting designs, his sets, his music, and his sound projection to create vivid multi-media experiences, in places from Canada to Iran to Greece. And he designed a system for the conversion of graphic stimuli into sound, a programme he called UPIC and which has now morphed into more sophisticated computer software like IanniX. (More than a decade before Boulez founded IRCAM, Xenakis had set up his own institute for music-technological research in Paris called EMAMu, which now exists as CCMIX.)

Experimental Music Notations and Approaches

With influential leaders such as Xenakis, many have stepped up to take the baton. Passing on the concept of an architectural and mathematical approach to music to generations to come.

Experimental music notations are common practices for many avant-garde musicians even till today. To many, these pieces of graphic scribbles and ink splatters are deemed as interesting visual pieces. To the artist, they mean a whole experience, both aural and visual. They are the blueprints to a whole architecture of music, awaiting to be conceived by the artist himself.

These pieces of notations have been compiled by many organisations around the world so as to raise awareness on the rich culture and heritage of experimental music. Organisations such as llllllll.co (there’s 8 ls) - a forum for all things related to music, have threads that compile great pieces of notations scores from artists all around the world as they serve to educate and inform the public.

Its a great resource - be it for the eyes or for the ears. You can check out the whole database here

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