AMS/SMT Joint Annual Meeting 2023

For the 2023 meeting of AMS/SMT in Denver, CO, the Study Group for Music Notation, Inscription, and Visualization will be holding a session titled “Beyond the Staff: Notation Pedagogies and Practices.” This session is dedicated to the role that music notations might have when teaching music history and theory in a post-canonical, decolonial, and global classroom.

Our keynote speaker Olufunmilayo B. Arewa (Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University) will bring her legal expertise to shed light on the consequences for underrepresented communities of an educational system that uncritically naturalizes Western standard notation. Papers by Toru Momii (Harvard U.), and Jonathan Gómez (USCalifornia), and Anabel Maler (UBC) will follow. 

Momii’s paper proposes a interactive lesson plan involving oral mnemonics (shōga) and visual notation for the shō, inviting students to reflect on how these two systems emphasize different musical parameters, reflect critically on which musical features are made explicit, implicit, or absent in each system, and evaluate the complementary relationship between oral and visual methods of learning music. Gómez’s paper focuses on the ambivalent relationship of Black American music with Western staff notation through the work of musician and composer Braxton Cook (b. 1991), proposing a phenomenology of “presence” to understand the role of staff notation in Black musical history. Maler’s paper centers on sign language as a form of embodied inscription, presenting analytical case studies of translated sign language music, signed rap and original signed music by Deaf artists Paris Glass, Harmony Baniaga, Rosa Lee Timm, Sean Forbes, Wawa, and Pamela Witcher.

The session will take place on Thursday, November 9th, 8-10pm in the Majesty Ballroom of the Conference Hotel in Denver, CO.  We look forward to seeing you there!