Equiton Music Notation by Rodney Fawcett

Equiton-chromatic

Equiton is a notation system designed by Rodney Fawcett and published by him in Zurich in 1958. It uses a six-degree staff rather than either a pitch-proportional twelve-degree chromatic staff, or a traditional diatonic staff. It uses its own rhythm notation system rather than using the traditional duration symbols. In 2004, Mark Gould designed a variant of Equiton that uses his own novel rhythmic notation.

There’s more info on Equiton on this page from the Encyclopaedia of Tuning site, in an incomplete translation. On that same page are depictions of:

  1. Walter Steffens’s notation in an example by Webern
  2. Schoenberg’s notation system applied to his composition Pierrot Lunaire
  3. Klavarskribo in a sonata by Chopin
  4. A comparative table of a piece by Boulez in horizontal Klavarskribo, standard notation, and Equiton

The images on that site appear to come from a book by Erhard Karkoschka on new music. The book has been translated from German to English.

Mark Gould’s website Equiton Press discusses Equiton and presents his own version of Equiton that features a novel rhythm notation system. (In particular see his Equiton presentation slides document available via his website.)

This master’s thesis by Kevin Lewis on graphic music notation depicts Equiton in passing.

Equiton is illustrated on the influences page of the TwinNote site.

There’s also a brief description of Equiton on the More Notation Systems Page.