Material Cultures of Music Notation

Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore an essential question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context?

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.

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

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