Becoming music

Abstract

Abstract Following a confused encounter with a music manuscript, the author explores the underpinnings of that experience, to understand the nature and structure of music notations as drawing systems. A music notation is an almost-impossibly complicated bit of drawing. Calling it a map does not quite do the trick, even if the page somehow works like a map. Labelling it a diagram, typically a didactic visual tool, is off the mark as well. Furthermore, the traditional western staff notation, as an example with historical authority, happens to be a richly developed system for reading and writing, for composition. This mixed bag of structure and function makes the staff notation a persistently vital teaching tool, even in our vexing era of computational solutions. In its hybrid display, a music notation gives its many user-communities a strategic, two-dimensional mechanism for cross-modal analysis and annotation, and ultimately performance of its content, in higher dimensions. How does a music drawing relate to other drawing systems? And how is it that we are enabled to fix and re-fix the multi-dimensional complexes of musical performance onto a page?