ABSTRACT
There has been a general tendency in Western music to restrict the performer's options ever more closely, and at the same time an increasing dedication to honoring the composer's intentions at the expense of the performer's interpretive freedom. Leaving the performing medium unspecified is not a practice unique to post-tonal music—Bach's Art of Fugue is a famous eighteenth-century example—but it is a practice that had been largely abandoned for some time. Free improvisation, where nothing is specified, can be exhilarating for the performer, but it never seemed to catch on and was largely a phenomenon of the 1970s. A graphic score is one in which conventional musical notation has been abandoned in favor of geometric shapes and designs that suggest more or less clearly how the music is to be performed. New notations have been devised for indeterminate music, including proportional and graphic notation; text scores dispense with notation entirely.
