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Anyone want to record this??

The twentieth century needs these mock pieces to keep composers in check.

My high school conductor had that same poster in his office and I always wondered where I could get one. That is, until I feasted my eyes and ears in college on the ars-subtilior inspired scores of George Crumb, like this beauty here.

Oh dearie me...
I've seen this before...
Yeah there are a whole bunch of these crazy scores all over the web..
And Tan Dun uses that circular notation too!

Release the penguins!

bahahahaha sounds like something from an old Batman movie...
Add Bicycle,
Begin to Fall
Have a nice day...
Genius!
If only people could write like this nowadays...

Get this one though:

Only felons may kill the oafish audience members. wahahahahahahaha this makes me laugh so badly...

Oh God! Does enybody hear this piece?
Is there any music in it?
It seems that is not the point of sound but of the image...

Neither of those things can be real, can they? It's impossible, or highly improbable, in any case for that to be played and sound in any way even slightly like music.

They are often passed out to beginning music students as a practical joke - "We'll start by sightreading this easy piece by a well known composer..."

ROTFLOL As the great philosopher Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim said while in his cups, "This is art with a capital F."

If I had the time, it would be fun to try realize one of these "scores" with the synthesizer tools I have on hand. While they are intended as parodies, some "passages" are actually realizable, that is, not fundamentally contradictory or ambiguous in notation. And before we all laugh our heads off, when actually turned into sound, some of those segments would not be any more outrageous to us than one of the chromatically and rhythmically bizarre roulades in an Impromptu by Chopin was to his first listeners. Just string some of those randomly together, regardless of key, and you can get some extraordinary results . Other passages would probably not be out of place in a piece by Ives. And anybody familiar with the fantastic piano-roll works by Nancarrow will recognize the similarity of parts of these parody scores to some of his pieces.

If you want to see bizarre-looking scores from centuries ago -- that are meant to be real music and not merely notational jokes -- look up Telemann's Gulliver Suite (not available at IMSLP, unfortunately) or some of the extremely weird pieces (both notationally and musically) that comprised the Medieval style now called Ars Subtilior (most not here either, even more unfortunately).

Take a look at:
http://quantumlodge.org/ezra/?p=373

as well as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_subtilior

--Sixtus

I think the comments are possibly more entertaining than the notes themselves!