Conference Agenda

Brahms, when invited by friends to a performance of Don Giovanni, proclaimed that he would rather just stay at home and read the score. This story captures something of our sense that scores are somehow “the music” itself, that they contain the fundamental essences of compositions. The notation is the music—or, as Marshall McLuhan would say, the medium is the message. As a medium and intercessor of musical meaning, notation has become so ubiquitous in Western art music that it sometimes seems beneath notice. It acts as a transparency through which we view the intentions of composers and the innermost qualities of the music. Notated music is, however, far from being a neutral medium. As Nicholas Cook has recognized, it has an agential quality, affording certain types of musical content and behavior; similarly, Floris Schuiling has proposed that notation is a mediating force in sociality and creativity, a force shaping the relationships that underpin the making of music. In this paper, I use these theories as a means for excavating the historical moment at which notation attained this status.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a transition from notation as a niche tool of the privileged through to the widespread sale and reading of notated music. The proliferation of material objects afforded by extensive use of notation was, I argue, responsible for some of the musical qualities and institutions that would go on to shape musical culture during the common practice period and beyond. Through a series of vignettes from the years around 1600, I demonstrate how the use of notation afforded certain types of musical behavior and curtailed others. The transference of passamezzi from oral into literate traditions, the printing of catalogued ornamentations, and the careful notations of vocal music by Giulio Caccini and Claudio Monteverdi are developments that relied upon the strong printing industry of late-Renaissance Italy; these are lenses through which fundamental transformations of the artform can be observed. In my examination of these processes, I demonstrate how the notating of music became a truly common practice within the art music of the West.

Can a single notation system capture every auditory and physical component of all music? I ask this, reflecting on the growing suspicion and vitriol towards western staff notation. Despite its shortcomings, western staff notation is quite adept at notating pitch, meter, and rhythm for the music it was developed for, particularly when employed in prescriptive uses of music-writing. Admittedly, however, the western staff is not able to capture every aspect of a composer’s intention, let alone every aspect of a performer’s actual performance. For descriptive transcription, western staff notation’s shortcomings become more apparent for transcribers seeking to report how a specific performance actually did sound.

The purpose of this project was twofold. First, to identify the potentials and pitfalls of doctoring the western staff to serve descriptive transcription practice. Second, to elucidate controversial violin soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s performance aesthetics and how they are disrupting expectations of Western classical music’s performance, performers, and audiences. To facilitate these inquiries I transcribed Kopatchinskaja’s 2012 performance of the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major Op. 61 with the Berliner Staatskapelle, printed side-by-side against Joachim’s 1905 edition as well as Kopatchinskaja’s own cadenza (inspired by Beethoven’s little-known cadenza for the piano arrangement of the concerto, featuring timpani.) Experimental doctoring include rubato arrows, borrowed gospel nomenclature from Andrew Legg, color changes to highlight improvised passages, and brief in-score text descriptions when necessary.

The transcriptions serve as useful data-rich analytical tools, offering insight into the evolution of violin performance and pedagogy, from Paganini’s bravura virtuosity, to Joachim’s Werktreue sympathies, to Kopatchinskaja’s post-millennial artistry. Despite the seeming shortcomings of doctored Western staff notation, from this project, it is clear that with the options available to us as scholars, performers, and music fans, the current solution requires such a multifarious approach. Such approaches concurrently refer to and utilize Western staff transcription, recordings, mechanical transcriptions, our own knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, our own musical practice.

“Mr. Coleman never learned to read or write conventional musical notation correctly”, wrote composer and scholar Gunther Schuller in the foreword to a collection of his own transcriptions of Ornette Coleman’s music in 1961. Schuller’s astonishment reveals an ideology in which composition is judged from the vantage point of ‘proper’ and legible writing within a system of comprehensible staff notation. In this paper, I read Coleman’s and Schuller’s encounter in transcription as a historiographical problem. Coleman’s music challenges the segregated historiographies of 20^th century experimental music by blurring the categories of composition and improvisation as they are mapped onto racialised genre markers of Western art music and jazz (Treitler 1996, Kisiedu & Lewis 2023). In my discussion of their encounter, I theorise Schuller’s comments about Coleman’s ‘improper’ writing and Schuller’s publication of ‘proper’ transcriptions as a form of (White) paternalism (Hartman 2022).

Schuller was, however, not unaware of the analytical shortcomings of a “capture in notation” (Griffin 2004, Crichlow & Gilroy 2022) and pointed to the “unnotable” aspects of jazz performance more generally (Schuller 1986, 5). In this paper, I carve out this idea of ‘the unnotable’ as crucial to Coleman’s musical thought. The ‘unnotable’ here is not to be confused with ‘not noteworthy’ but designates the im/possibility of naming, grasping or objectifying Coleman’s musical performance. What Fumi Okiji writes with regards to jazz experimentalism more generally can be heard also in Coleman’s ‘unnotable’ performance: “Incomprehensibility, deep meaning, and incoherence are the markings of black radicalism” (Okiji 2018, 81).

Coleman’s poetics of musical thought finds no home in Schuller’s ‘notism’ (Brownell 1994, 15), an appropriation in notation. Rather, Coleman’s compositional practice is animated by what Nathaniel Mackey calls “fugitive spirit” (1993, 269), a continuous escaping from propriety. As such, Coleman’s music complicates the idea of composition as necessarily a form of legible notation.

If notational hegemony crumbles in Coleman’s music, I wonder: How to attune to musical thought outside of a “capture in notation”? And what does a theory of ‘the unnotable’ sound like?