What Is "Res Facta"?

On the nature of musical scores and the rationale to prepare them: formulating directives

“…When I was first writing down Malédiction, I did entertain that the act of reading its score would be somewhat similar to that "cantare super librum" practice of the Renaissance. Indeed, the first solution I actually intended to give to the problem of rewriting that score was to prepare two 3 Actually, the full extent of the meaning of those two terms is subject to quite a bit of musicological dispute (for this, see FERAND, 1957;and BENT, 1983), but this more general version of their meaning will be sufficient for our purposes here. different ones for the piece: one to be performed "super librum" (and that score was to be indeed just its original first score, tout court), and a "res facta" score, one in which I would not only have my improvisational passages fully written down (based on my best improvised versions), but I would also turn the piece's electroacoustic part (which was fabricated live by the computer by the application of strict algorithmic rules) into a fixed-media version, evidently containing only the most auspicious runs of the computational algorithms.…”