Animated Notation in Multiple Parts for Crowd of Non-professional Performers

The Max Maestro – an animated music notation system was developed to enable the exploration of artistic possibilities for composition and performance practices within the field of contemporary art music, more specifically, to enable a large crowd of non-professional performers regardless of their musical background to perform a fixed music compositions written in multiple individual parts. Furthermore, the Max Maestro was developed to facilitate concert hall performances where non-professional performers could be synchronised with an electronic music part. This paper presents the background, the content and the artistic ideas with the Max Maestro system and gives two examples of live concert hall performances where the Max Maestro was used. An artistic research approach with an auto ethnographic method was adopted for the study. This paper contributes with new knowledge to the field of animated music notation.