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
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.
