If you have a skill to read music and play the piano reasonably well, you can learn a little piece by Chopin after a few hours of practice. Your performance would probably sound not too dissimilar to what was played by the composer for the first time. This is because the conventional notation system in music (i.e. music score, which is not music itself) is so efficient that it allows composers and musicians to encode and decode musical pieces very accurately.
On Translation>>>
It was refreshing to learn that there are many contemporary composers who deliberately choose NOT to employ conventional notation system to encode their work. Instead, they use extremely free and radical forms. As a result, I suspect that a same score produces tunes that sound very different every time it is performed. The composers’ intention in notation here is totally different from that of Chopin. It is probably not so important for them to make performers replicate what composers heard in their heads. Instead, what really counts is the process of (often spontaneous) ‘Translation’ that happens when the music score has been read by the performers. Unlike Decoding, the objective of Translation is present the piece to the audience in best possible way they can think of (like when you are translating a foreign novel), therefore, various elements can be added to/deleted from/modified to the original in the process of translating.
On Translation of Movement>>>
We played with the notion of ‘Translation’ in many ways through this residency. As we (Stephanie, Richard and myself) came from fairly diverse backgrounds, a little movement sketch that had gone through these three bodies (by mirroring movement as well as writing text and sketches) turned out to be something quite dramatically different from the original while there is something that remained all way through.
The sharing was satisfactory as we managed to make a fairly cohesive presentation of the Translation process by displaying it stage by stage. It feels crucial to explore and discover playful and functional ways to integrate this Translation mechanism within the piece in the future development.
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