ABOUT

What

The AMS Notation, Inscription, and Visualization Study Group was founded by Giulia Accornero and Ginger Dellenbaugh in January 2022.

Since the birth of musicology in the early nineteenth century, music notation has been the essential referent for the discipline. Traditionally, it has held a central position in all branches of the subject: as an historical trace (music history), as the basis for analysis and aesthetic evaluation (music theory and criticism), as the threshold between canonical Western Art music and oral traditions (musicology vs ethnomusicology).

As the field attempts to reimagine itself in terms of diversity, inclusion and accessibility, this group seeks to 1) rethink how notation and literacy shaped the Western canon, music pedagogy and access requirements to the field, and marked the disciplinary divide between music theory, music history, and ethnomusicology; as well as 2) provide a space and set of resources for overcoming these disciplinary divides, approaching notation from new angles in light of forms of music transmission that have been Othered in standard narratives, or are dependent on new technologies whose affordances are still understudied.

Why Now

With the advent of New Musicology, the discipline began to rethink its fixation with notated objects and broaden its focus to include social and cultural practices. This move corresponded with an increasing interest in the roles played by orality, improvisation, and performance. In more recent years, the field has also turned to materiality as part of a broader attempt to renegotiate musical agency among people and things. And yet, by inquiring into the “things” involved in musicking, scholars have begun to confront notation once again from historical, cultural, and media-theoretical perspectives. Moreover, since the advent of electronic music—and even more dramatically that of digital technology—composers, engineers, performers are dealing with new forms of music inscription (e.g., coding) and visualization (software’s symbolic systems) that musicologists are often not equipped to account for.

As a result, while forms of music notation, inscription and visualization still remain central to musicological research and practice, the modes and methods of creating and interpreting these practices, as well as their social and political contexts and role, have altered dramatically. Our study group will seek to address this diverse and ever-expanding terrain in a number of ways.

Aims

To reconsider the role musical notation has played in shaping the history and historiography of Western music (how notation was instrumental in defining the Western canon and its Others), as well as the role notation has played in discriminating by race, gender, and class.
To provide a space to recover and study the social and political impetus of alternative notations, modes of inscription and visualization, as well as recording and mnemotechniques in Western and non-Western communities of practice underserved by standard notation. This means also providing a space to reassess the criteria and characteristics of notational practices that are not currently taken into account by canonical narratives.
To provide a space to study the use of standard notational practices in communities underrepresented in the Western canon.
To provide a space to converse with and learn from engineers, computer scientists, and visual designers about the technical affordances offered by software and digital tools for music visualization, considering in particular their potential such tools have for pedagogical, performative, and aesthetic innovation.
To reconsider modes of analysis or systems of thought that rely on the parameters set by notation and digital visualization practices. What constraints and opportunities are offered by practices based on, for example, standard diastematic notations, neumatic notation, tablatures, sheet music animations, etc.?
To challenge commonly accepted terminologies and paradigms of notational development, particularly those that support the binaries of vernacular vs. elite practice, and oral vs. literate cultures, etc.
To expand the conventional understanding of notation as a process that is predominantly graphical and “on the page” (an inscribed surface) to include alternative modes of notation, such as iconographical, tactile (e.g., braille) and cheironomic systems, oral systems (Widdess 1996), digital visualization of the aural experience, as well as systems generated by communities of practice or artificial intelligence.

Who

Because notation has played an integral role in disciplining the boundaries between music theory, music history, and ethnomusicology, this group aims to create a cross-disciplinary dialogue with scholars from these disciplines. Moreover, as a nexus for multiple aspects of musical engagement, notation is a concern for a diverse community of practitioners and scholars, including performers, composers, paleographers, semioticians, and historians, all of whom have their own particular approach to inscription systems and their functionality. In addition, notation plays a role in disciplines ancillary to music studies such as disability, gender, and post-colonial studies, media theory and semiotics, art history, cognition.