The ethnomusicology I refer to is the approach which Frank Harrison famously said that it was ‘the function of all musicology to be’. Footnote 7 An ‘ethnomusicology of notation’ signifies a broadly anthropological perspective on the social, epistemic and creative processes involved in practices of writing and reading music, instead of a narrowly musicological or music-theoretical one, which would study notation mainly for its musical content.

Footnote 6 The idea of an ‘ethnomusicology of notation’ is intended as a counterpoint to the ‘musicology of performance’ and its attempt to blur traditional boundaries between musicology and ethnomusicology in favour of a broad investigation of the relation between music and what it means to be human. In this article I propose a framework that views such processes of signification and representation as an integral and important part of our ‘musicking’ behaviour. To be sure, such long-standing and widespread ideas of notation being removed from musical reality cannot simply be dismissed as ideological, but the idea that notation is simply ‘unmusical’ fails to account for its importance. Considering the significance of notation for the construction of musical knowledge, creativity and culture in many different musical practices in the world and throughout history, notation might be seen as one of the ways in which aurality has been mediated. Footnote 5 As he argues, aurality has its own history of mediation. As Emma Dillon has observed: ‘Writers from Isidore of Seville to Ingarden suggest a drastic distinction between inscription and performance: music exists in sound, and writing is a representation removed from musical reality.’ Footnote 3 David Tudor once said, ‘There is a paragraph in Busoni which speaks of notation as an evil separating musicians from music, and I feel everyone should know that this is true.’ Footnote 4 There is a hint in such comments of what Jonathan Sterne has called the ‘audio-visual litany’, positing the aural experience of music as more authentic and truthful than one mediated by vision. Footnote 2Īlthough such arguments have done important work to change the scope, methods and aims of music scholarship, I find problematic the way in which this perspective seems only to perpetuate the long-standing discourse that considers music notation to stand outside the cultural processes that we study, and does not see it as an object of social and creative interaction in its own right. Footnote 1 Notation reifies, essentializes, disciplines according to Philip Bohlman, it ‘becomes a convenient way of collapsing time and space, thereby removing all sorts of Others – Western and non-Western – to the plane of the universal’. Nicholas Cook argued that the ‘ocularcentric identification of the score with what the music is’ turned music into an ‘esoteric form of literature’, distorting our views on music history, aesthetics and performance. A music scholarship that identified music with musical writing was seen to bypass the practical, creative and social processes that are involved in making and listening to music, and moreover to render theoretically and methodologically secondary the cultural contexts in which such processes take place. In the various arguments for a more diverse, social and ethical musicology that have been made in the past 30 years, a central contention has been that the score is not (the) music. In doing so, this article presents an interdisciplinary approach to a topic that has traditionally defined the disciplinary centre of music scholarship.

It is described in terms of three distinct processes, namely mobilization, entextualization and remediation. This constructive work is simultaneously ontological and ethical. It is suggested that, rather than detracting from musical reality, notation composes musical cultures.

This article presents a methodological outline for an ethnomusicology of music notation by investigating the musicality of notation not in terms of its representation of musical structures, but in terms of its mediation of the social and creative agency of musicians. However, it is difficult to address its function since the usual conception of notation in music scholarship is at odds with studying performance in the first place. The ubiquity and diversity of notational practices in music suggest that notation is a significant part of human beings' musicking behaviour.

Music symbols in word 2010