On the nature of musical scores and the rationale to prepare them: formulating directives

Abstract

This paper investigates the nature of written musical scores and their role in the communication between composer and performer. Using as thread the narrative of the rewriting of a problematic earlier score, the investigation starts from Derrida's emphasis of absence in the phenomenon of writing (1982) and Eco's concept of model reader (1979), and stresses the importance of improvisation in the creative process and its impact in the act of writing, introducing a notion of hermeneutics from Barthes' distinction between Work and Text (1977), Bloom's concept of poetic misprision (1975), and Austin's theory of speech-acts (1962), which is used to create an interpretative tripartite model. There is then a discussion on the purely abstract nature of a composition and the pitfalls involved in the task of transcribing performances. During the course of the discussion, the rationale investigated engenders twelve directives for the effective preparation of musical scores.