Material Cultures of Music Notation

New Perspectives on Musical Inscription

Floris Schuiling, Emily Payne, Floris Schuiling, Emily Payne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000581201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore a fundamental question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context? Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from musicology, media studies, performance studies, and more, the chapters in this volume offer a wide array of new perspectives that foreground the materiality of music notation. From digital scores to the transmission of manuscripts in the Middle Ages, the volume deliberately disrupts boundaries of discipline, historical period, genre, and tradition, by approaching notation's materiality through four key interrelated themes: knowledge, the body, social relations, and technology. Together, the chapters capture vital new work in an essential emerging area of scholarship.

1IntroductionNotation and/as material culture

Floris Schuiling and Emily Payne

DOI: 10.4324/9780429342837-1

Notation has long occupied a major position in music scholarship. Indeed, for many years it constituted the essential object of study, not only representing musical styles and practices but more broadly defining what music is. Guido Adler, writing his foundational programme for the study of music in 1885, stated that the history of music ‘looks at artistic creations as such, […] without special consideration given to the life and effect of individual artists who have participated in [their] steady development’ (Mugglestone and Adler 1981, 7; emphasis added). Thus, he not only defined the existence of music in terms of separate, independently existing objects rather than as a practice or performing art, but also suggested that these objects could be understood—indeed, were better understood—without any consideration of the social and cultural life in which they were created and performed. The idea that music scholarship studies musical works as represented by notation and not the practices and processes of musical production, performance, dissemination, and reception remained a foundational assumption of musicology for a long time. Nearly a century after Adler, Carl Dahlhaus expressed more or less the same idea more succinctly: ‘The concept “work”, and not “event”, is the cornerstone of music history’ (Dahlhaus 1983, 4).

Since the end of the twentieth century, musicology has increasingly moved away from this work-centred perspective towards an understanding of music as a social and cultural practice. Arguments for this shift have proceeded largely from a critique of the centrality of the score in traditional music scholarship (see, among many others, Cook 2013; Goehr 2007 [1992]). However, while few scholars still consider notation to be an objective representation of music per se, this invites the question of how to conceptualise the role of musical writing, representation, and visualisation in the cultural practice of music. Both the traditional work concept and a performance-orientated music scholarship seem to locate notation outside of both music and culture. After the critique of the work concept, the ways in which writing and reading music are themselves an integral and important part of ‘musicking’ behaviour must be reconsidered (Schuiling 2019). The iconoclasm of the New Musicology thus necessitates an investigation into how notations construct—or compose—musical cultures.

Critiques of the centrality of the score in music scholarship questioned the reification or objectification implied by a work-centred musicology on the premise that music is better understood as a process than as a tangible object. However, scholars in the field of material culture studies have suggested ways of thinking about objects that do not set them apart from social and cultural processes. One might view objectification as itself a process in which questions of epistemology, cultural identity, and social values are negotiated (Miller 2005). Alternatively, one might consider objects as ‘actors’ that participate in our social and cultural practices (Gell 1998; Latour 2005). Yet another view would question the opposition between processes and tangible objects, arguing that knowledge, creativity, and the social are formed in the development of a ‘co-responsiveness’ between material processes of becoming (Ingold 2011). The term ‘material culture’ comes from anthropology and archaeology, where, in the course of the twentieth century, its study developed from the collection and taxonomy of objects from the past and from non-western cultures to the ‘investigation of the relationship between people and things irrespective of time and space’ (Miller and Tilley 1996, 5). The idea that there exists a reciprocal relationship between people and things has, in different ways, been a fundamental tenet of various other twentieth-century strands of scholarship, including media studies, science and technology studies, cybernetics, and ecological theories of perception—to name just a few. Over the last two decades, this perspective has been influential across the humanities and social sciences with scholars drawing on these and other fields in a movement variously labelled ‘thing theory’ (Brown 2004), ‘new materialism’ (Coole and Frost 2010; Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012), or, more generally, the ‘material turn’.

Reflecting this broader trend in the humanities and social sciences, a rapidly growing number of music scholars have turned their attention to the role of material objects and technologies in the construction and transmission of (musical) knowledge, culture, and creativity. In particular, there has been a renewed interest in organology, a field that until recently played a relatively minor role in these conversations. Its significance has been somewhat greater in ethnomusicology, where perhaps the earliest beginnings of a twenty-first-century organological revival can be identified.¹ Scholars such as Veronica Doubleday (1999), Regula Qureshi (2000), and Kevin Dawe (2012 [2003]) have shown how politics, power, and identity are configured in the interplay between instruments, bodies, repertoire, and performance. More recently, the work of Eliot Bates (2012) has been influential in its focus on the active role of instruments in such processes. In the last decade, musicological reconsiderations of musical instruments have emphasised their role in politics and identity less than in the construction of musical ontologies and epistemologies (although see Ahrendt 2018; Irving 2009). In different ways, Emily Dolan (Dolan 2012; Tresch and Dolan 2013) and Roger Moseley (2016) have revealed musical instruments' entanglements with the emergence of modern science and technology, opening up a field of inquiry into the materialist foundations of western art music. From a music-theoretical perspective, Alexander Rehding (2016a; 2016b) and Jonathan de Souza (2017) consider instruments as materialisations of knowledge and cognition, illustrating how musicians quite literally ‘think with’ their instruments, and that composition is not just an abstract arrangement of tones, but a practical intervention into this embodied relationship.

Compared to organology, the study of notation has been more central to music scholarship. Yet, it has similarly been regarded by some as exemplifying a stuffy positivism, concerned with technicalities rather than the things that ‘really matter’ about music.² In his book that is viewed by some as having kindled the New Musicology in the 1980s, Joseph Kerman asserts that the seminar on notation in mid-century musicological curricula ‘focused not on music but on rather low-level problem-solving’, and that dropping this seminar from the core curriculum was a ‘first step in the liberation of musicology’ from its positivist paradigm (Kerman 1985, 46). However, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, a total rejection of the study of notation excludes a wide range of interesting work on the reciprocity between notation and its social contexts, on its relations to musicians' bodies and to other musical technologies, as well as work that develops a multifaceted understanding of notation's representation of musical structure. The materialist approach found in recent music studies, we argue, provides a way to attend to these aspects of notation without returning to the positivism of traditional music scholarship.

Yet, it should be noted that the materiality of notation is by no means a wholly new area of study. Although some scholars have argued that the recent surge in organological research constitutes a ‘new organology’ (Roda 2007; Tresch and Dolan 2013), Moseley suggests that ‘organology’s attentiveness to specific instantiations of musical culture and its concomitant suspicion of generalisations derived from sweeping narratives can be seen to have anticipated the recent material and informational turns of the (post)humanities at large' (Moseley 2016, 90). Similarly, the attention to empirical detail in the study of notation has meant that historians of notation have always had to attend to the materiality of their subject matter. They have long been aware that the idea of a musical ‘work’ is far from absolute, insofar as scores construct the music as much as they represent it. In other words, to approach notation as a form of material culture is not a matter of breaking radically new ground but rather to recognise and attend to an aspect of notation that has long been inherent to its study. The work of Leo Treitler (1974; 1982) in particular marked a crucial shift in considering early music notations in the context of already existing practices of performance, memorisation, and transmission, as material artefacts embedded in these practices, rather than as the first steps from an ‘oral’ to a ‘literate’ culture. Whether it is through the study of notation as visual culture (Haar 1995), codicological studies of early music manuscripts (Alden 2010; Deeming and Leach, 2015; Dillon 2002; Leach 2011), or the study of music printing and the music publishing industry (Christensen 1999; Davies 2006; Loughridge 2016; Orden 2000, 2015), the materiality of notation has been both an implicit and explicit concern in historical musicology.

The same can be said, perhaps even more assuredly, about ethnomusicological studies of notation. Discussions of notation in ethnomusicology almost exclusively concern the practice of transcription, underlining the foundational distinction between oral and literate culture as well as the colonialist legacies of the field. Although this work has enabled essential reflections on the politics of notation, its relations to performance, instruments, and recording media, and its role (both positive and negative) in the construction of scholarly knowledge (Ellingson 1992a; England et al. 1964; Jairazbhoy 1977; Seeger 1958; Stanyek 2014), its aim has usually been the representation of musical structures or practice, rather than to consider the use of notation itself as the subject of ethnomusicological research. Nevertheless, there has been a minor tradition of ethnomusicological work on non-western notation, championed particularly by Mantle Hood, who saw it as a way for the western scholar to ‘kick the habit of his addiction to the Western staff’ (Hood 1971, 93). Much of this research has been concerned with Asian musics (Kaufmann 1967) and it ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Notation and/as material culture
• Part I Epistemologies of notation
• Part II Notation and the body
• Part III Notation and social relations
• Part IV Notation, instruments, and technology
• Index