1st Edition

Material Cultures of Music Notation New Perspectives on Musical Inscription

Edited By Floris Schuiling, Emily Payne Copyright 2022
    230 Pages 46 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    230 Pages 46 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    Chapter One: Introduction: Notation and/as material culture

    Floris Schuiling and Emily Payne

    Part I: Epistemologies of notation

    Chapter Two: Was 1974 the End of Music History? Universalism, cybernetics, and the International Conference of New Musical Notation

    Giulia Accornero

    Chapter Three: Encyclopaedias and empty staves: Re-reading music in Hanne Darboven’s Quartett ›88‹

    Elaine Fitz Gibbon

    Chapter Four: Scoring the listener: Notation and representation in acousmatic music

    Patrick Valiquet

    Part II: Notation and the body

    Chapter Five: The Deaf body beyond music: Music notation by Christine Sun Kim

    Chae-Lin Kim

    Chapter Six: Music, notation, and embodiment in early sixteenth-century Italian pictures

    Tim Shephard and Sanna Raninen

    Chapter Seven: The work of notation in the visual culture of medieval devotion

    Beth Williamson

    Part III: Notation and social relations

    Chapter Eight: Jianpu simplified notation and the transnational in musical repertoires of New York’s Chinatown

    Joseph S. Kaminski

    Chapter Nine: Mediating minstrelsy: Notating instrumental identity in fourteenth-century song

    David Maw

    Chapter Ten: Inscription, gesture, and social relations: Notation in Karnatak music

    Lara Pearson

    Part IV: Notation, instruments, and technology

    Chapter Eleven: Digital scores, algorithmic agents, and encoded ontologies: On the objects of musical computation

    Brian A. Miller

    Chapter Twelve: Perforating the subject: The player piano rolls of Conlon Nancarrow

    Naomi Woo

    Chapter Thirteen: Material bias: David Tudor’s realisations

    You Nakai

    Chapter Fourteen: ‘I Feel Love’: Music mutation in the electronic age

    Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

    Biography

    Floris Schuiling is Assistant Professor at Utrecht University. His areas of expertise are modern and contemporary music in the Netherlands, especially improvised and experimental music, and the role of technology and material culture in musical creativity,with a focus on performance practices.

    Emily Payne is Lecturer in Music at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include performance studies (particularly of post-war music), creativity, collaboration, embodiment, and materiality.