(Counter)Historical Context for Music Notation
Before diving into the interview excerpts, I'd like to introduce a few ideas that will help to contextualize the material that follows.
Part of my inspiration for this project grew out of a desire to apply Nicholas Mirzoeff’s model for the dialectical opposition between visuality and countervisuality to the study of musical representations. In his book, The Right to Look, Mirzoeff explains how visuality conjoins authority and power via a set of operations that he outlines as follows: “first, visuality classifies by naming, categorizing, and defining, a process defined by Foucault as the 'nomination of the visible [...]; second, visuality separates and segregates those it visualizes to prevent them from cohering as political subjects[...]; third, it makes this separated classification seem right and hence aesthetic." (Mirzoeff, 3)
Obviously, my application of Mirzoeff’s ideas to the history of visual music representation will involve a certain amount of modification and abstraction, since here I am dealing with musical space, instead of colonial, imperial, and military-industrial power complexes. But it seems plausible that correlations might be drawn between the operational basis of visuality as a normative force and the influence of musical representations (both written and digital) as a means for setting the borders of what is possible within the realm of music. It should be noted that I do not intend to spearhead a witch hunt vilifying notation, classical music culture, or digital software tools; whatever the nature of these things, I am more interested in investigating their genealogy than in railing against them. Perhaps an analogy can be made here with Derrida's reading of the pharmakon and the play of différence between spoken vs written language, or in our case between music-as-heard vs. music-as-score. Like Derrida, I prefer to embrace the ambiguity between these two modes of communication, rather than definitively privileging one over the other. Ultimately, my goal is to identify some of the ways that these two expressive modes—sound and vision—interact and actively condition the possibilities of each other.
The most basic function of music notation is that it enables the consideration of music outside the confines of time. In other words, sound's ontology is intrinsically connected to the linear unfolding of time, and before the advent of recording technologies the only way to transcend this ephemeral quality was by creating a visual mapping of sound into physical space. This mapping resulted in the musical score, which over time has come to embody a set of aesthetic values. By most accounts, the visual mapping of sound onto paper first emerged in monasteries during the 9th-century for two primary purposes: first, it served as an aid in the memorization of tonal inflections associated with the recitation of scripture, and second, it offered a prescriptive account of how the scriptures should be recited (i.e., performed). Musically speaking, this early system – known as neumatic notation – roughly conveyed relative information about pitch frequencies, but lacked the ability to specify discrete, metrically subdivided rhythmic durations.
Over the course of the medieval period, the neumatic system became increasingly complex and eventually evolved into staff notation, which features multiple horizontal lines used for arranging pitches in vertical space according to their fixed position in the frequency spectrum. This musical innovation ushered in a transition from monophonic melodies, such as those heard in Gregorian chant, towards the more texturally dense polyphony of voices found in Renaissance motets. Beyond textural expansion, the new staff notation also provided a means for indicating more precise musical content, giving the composer control over the domain of time on a score’s horizontal x-axis and pitch on the vertical y-axis.
With the invention of the printing press in the 15th-century, music notation became more standardized and solidified a system of aesthetic values that continued to flourish throughout the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods. Without getting bogged down in an extended history lesson, it suffices to say that these values have tended to privilege the formation of musical taxonomies related to the development of several distinct stylistic attributes, including rhythmic synchronization, metrical hierarchies, functional harmonic progressions, and large-scale tonal organization. In short, the widespread dissemination of notated scores helped to advance the entire system of tonality as a normative force which still dominates the mainstream of Western music culture today.
Western music aesthetic values eventually came to privilege a notion of the notated score as the crystallized form of a composer’s musical intentions, and they imbued the composer with the authority of an overseer exercising full control of his musical materials. This implicit narrative casts the composer as a heroic genius and its fullest expression is manifest in the Romantic-era development of the “musical work” concept. According to this view, the musical work is thought to form a cohesive totality that is articulated by the logical internal organization of its constituent parts; additionally, the overall form of a work yields a proliferation of hierarchical interrelationships playing out on multiple structural levels. As Janet Schmalfeldt has noted, the composer-as-genuis concept and the teleological drive of the musical work are both heavily steeped in Hegel's philosophy, which was contemporaneous with the late classical period inhabited by composers such as Beethoven.
The residual effects of this aesthetic are still largely intact today, although the stylistic characteristics exhibited by its multiple incarnations have evolved considerably over the course of the 19th and 20th-centuries. Notable ruptures in the historical progression include the push towards increasingly chromatic harmony by late Romantic composers like Richard Wagner, the post-romantic development of so-called “atonality” by Second Viennese School composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and the integral serialism of post-World War II composers like Pierre Boulez. It is certainly possible to consider these stylistic developments as subversive acts since they sought to dislodge the normative force of tonality, but at a deeper level they continued to perpetuate the ideal of organic unity and championed notational hyper-literacy as a superior model. Moreover, they themselves eventually ascended to the helm of "high art" classical culture and instituted a new brand of musical visuality, thus exemplifying what Frederic Jameson has described as the process of dialectical reversals, in which something that was once subordinate becomes the new norm. (Jameson, 309) It is possible to identify several such aesthetic upheavals and subsequent dialectic reversals playing out over the course of the 20th-century—for instance, the progressive microtonality of Wyschnegradsky and Scelsi eventually ascended to institutional legitmacy in the music of composers like Grisey and Haas; likewise, the extended playing (and notational) techniques found in Penderecki's music later developed into the alien instrumental sound palettes deployed by contemporary mainstays such as Ferneyhough and Lachenmann. Many other lines of musical deterritorialization could be listed here, all of which were enacted at least in part by composers who exploited the limits of notation. But there is another factor that must be considered as a contributor to the evolution of Western musical styles, and that is the physical materiality of the instruments themselves. The next page presents a brief overview of this concurrent topic.
NOTES:
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
Schmalfeldt, Janet. The Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early 19th-century Music (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Jameson, Frederic. Marxism and Form (Princeton University Press, 1971).
Part of my inspiration for this project grew out of a desire to apply Nicholas Mirzoeff’s model for the dialectical opposition between visuality and countervisuality to the study of musical representations. In his book, The Right to Look, Mirzoeff explains how visuality conjoins authority and power via a set of operations that he outlines as follows: “first, visuality classifies by naming, categorizing, and defining, a process defined by Foucault as the 'nomination of the visible [...]; second, visuality separates and segregates those it visualizes to prevent them from cohering as political subjects[...]; third, it makes this separated classification seem right and hence aesthetic." (Mirzoeff, 3)
Obviously, my application of Mirzoeff’s ideas to the history of visual music representation will involve a certain amount of modification and abstraction, since here I am dealing with musical space, instead of colonial, imperial, and military-industrial power complexes. But it seems plausible that correlations might be drawn between the operational basis of visuality as a normative force and the influence of musical representations (both written and digital) as a means for setting the borders of what is possible within the realm of music. It should be noted that I do not intend to spearhead a witch hunt vilifying notation, classical music culture, or digital software tools; whatever the nature of these things, I am more interested in investigating their genealogy than in railing against them. Perhaps an analogy can be made here with Derrida's reading of the pharmakon and the play of différence between spoken vs written language, or in our case between music-as-heard vs. music-as-score. Like Derrida, I prefer to embrace the ambiguity between these two modes of communication, rather than definitively privileging one over the other. Ultimately, my goal is to identify some of the ways that these two expressive modes—sound and vision—interact and actively condition the possibilities of each other.
The most basic function of music notation is that it enables the consideration of music outside the confines of time. In other words, sound's ontology is intrinsically connected to the linear unfolding of time, and before the advent of recording technologies the only way to transcend this ephemeral quality was by creating a visual mapping of sound into physical space. This mapping resulted in the musical score, which over time has come to embody a set of aesthetic values. By most accounts, the visual mapping of sound onto paper first emerged in monasteries during the 9th-century for two primary purposes: first, it served as an aid in the memorization of tonal inflections associated with the recitation of scripture, and second, it offered a prescriptive account of how the scriptures should be recited (i.e., performed). Musically speaking, this early system – known as neumatic notation – roughly conveyed relative information about pitch frequencies, but lacked the ability to specify discrete, metrically subdivided rhythmic durations.
Over the course of the medieval period, the neumatic system became increasingly complex and eventually evolved into staff notation, which features multiple horizontal lines used for arranging pitches in vertical space according to their fixed position in the frequency spectrum. This musical innovation ushered in a transition from monophonic melodies, such as those heard in Gregorian chant, towards the more texturally dense polyphony of voices found in Renaissance motets. Beyond textural expansion, the new staff notation also provided a means for indicating more precise musical content, giving the composer control over the domain of time on a score’s horizontal x-axis and pitch on the vertical y-axis.
With the invention of the printing press in the 15th-century, music notation became more standardized and solidified a system of aesthetic values that continued to flourish throughout the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods. Without getting bogged down in an extended history lesson, it suffices to say that these values have tended to privilege the formation of musical taxonomies related to the development of several distinct stylistic attributes, including rhythmic synchronization, metrical hierarchies, functional harmonic progressions, and large-scale tonal organization. In short, the widespread dissemination of notated scores helped to advance the entire system of tonality as a normative force which still dominates the mainstream of Western music culture today.
Western music aesthetic values eventually came to privilege a notion of the notated score as the crystallized form of a composer’s musical intentions, and they imbued the composer with the authority of an overseer exercising full control of his musical materials. This implicit narrative casts the composer as a heroic genius and its fullest expression is manifest in the Romantic-era development of the “musical work” concept. According to this view, the musical work is thought to form a cohesive totality that is articulated by the logical internal organization of its constituent parts; additionally, the overall form of a work yields a proliferation of hierarchical interrelationships playing out on multiple structural levels. As Janet Schmalfeldt has noted, the composer-as-genuis concept and the teleological drive of the musical work are both heavily steeped in Hegel's philosophy, which was contemporaneous with the late classical period inhabited by composers such as Beethoven.
The residual effects of this aesthetic are still largely intact today, although the stylistic characteristics exhibited by its multiple incarnations have evolved considerably over the course of the 19th and 20th-centuries. Notable ruptures in the historical progression include the push towards increasingly chromatic harmony by late Romantic composers like Richard Wagner, the post-romantic development of so-called “atonality” by Second Viennese School composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and the integral serialism of post-World War II composers like Pierre Boulez. It is certainly possible to consider these stylistic developments as subversive acts since they sought to dislodge the normative force of tonality, but at a deeper level they continued to perpetuate the ideal of organic unity and championed notational hyper-literacy as a superior model. Moreover, they themselves eventually ascended to the helm of "high art" classical culture and instituted a new brand of musical visuality, thus exemplifying what Frederic Jameson has described as the process of dialectical reversals, in which something that was once subordinate becomes the new norm. (Jameson, 309) It is possible to identify several such aesthetic upheavals and subsequent dialectic reversals playing out over the course of the 20th-century—for instance, the progressive microtonality of Wyschnegradsky and Scelsi eventually ascended to institutional legitmacy in the music of composers like Grisey and Haas; likewise, the extended playing (and notational) techniques found in Penderecki's music later developed into the alien instrumental sound palettes deployed by contemporary mainstays such as Ferneyhough and Lachenmann. Many other lines of musical deterritorialization could be listed here, all of which were enacted at least in part by composers who exploited the limits of notation. But there is another factor that must be considered as a contributor to the evolution of Western musical styles, and that is the physical materiality of the instruments themselves. The next page presents a brief overview of this concurrent topic.
NOTES:
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
Schmalfeldt, Janet. The Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early 19th-century Music (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Jameson, Frederic. Marxism and Form (Princeton University Press, 1971).
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