Haley Garrick

About Haley Garrick

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April 19 2023

Notation and Inscription: Considering the Tactile

Haley Garrick 2022, Presentations of the Symposium

Virginia Georgallas (Berkeley University)
Sarah Koval (Harvard University)

What is the relationship between notation and inscription? Are they equivalent? Thor Magnusson (2019), in his work exploring the ancestry of contemporary music technologies—“how we think with and through technology”—offers a tripartite system for distinguishing different modes of sonic writing: 1) material inscription (on the bodies of musical instruments), 2) symbolic inscription (notation), and 3) signal inscription (what became possible after the advent of sound recording). For Magnusson, inscription seems to be available through every technology equally, and his divisions explicitly separate immaterial (symbolic) notation from material inscription. And yet, Andrea Bachner (2018) has recently cautioned that inscription is a master metaphor of contemporary thought, a theoretical figure and trope through which poststructuralist theory “stages and concretizes its conceptual moves.” Born of nineteenth-century disciplinary formations and inventions (such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, and technologies of photography and phonography), the work of inscription is powerful, ubiquitous, and timeless. For Bachner, the trope of inscription allows theorists to shape the material world by giving their texts a seemingly material foundation.

This paper asks whether inscription is a theoretical tool worth salvaging for music studies. An obvious distinction between notation and inscription is that the latter implies a material encounter, while the former often suggests a symbolic or abstracted realm, as Magnusson does—for him, notation is only one of many inscriptive technologies. Moreover, some media theoretical framings of notation have anachronistically applied digital metaphors—for example, Floris Schuiling (2019) defines musical notations as “interfaces for imagining virtual musical relations.” This approach is, at the very least, historically contingent, and relies, like Magnusson does, on assumed continuities between pre-digital and digital notational technologies. We propose looking for models of inscription that pre- date the phonograph and the digital. Such models may offer new understandings of notation shaped by inscriptive processes that attend to touch and the tactile (Saha, 2019). Moments of tactile encounter and impression—on paper, wax, wood, and fiber—may illuminate aspects of musical praxis (beyond creative and interpretive authority) that highlight the labour of compositional assemblage and notational practices.

April 19 2023

Reframing, Rethinking, Renaming: Towards an Anthropology of Notational Artifacts

Haley Garrick 2022, Presentations of the Symposium 0

Giovanni Cestino, University of Milan

In the history of musicology, no disciplinary turn has ever deprived notation- bearing objects (i.e. scores, parts, or “music books” in general) of the status of sources, of written witnesses of something other than themselves. This powerful concept – along with other key-concepts in music philology – work at their best when content forms, compositional or editorial processes, and music writing are to be investigated, but do not prove as effective when usage practices, performative processes, or music reading are under study. In other words, an understanding of a written document as a “bundle of affordances” (Sterne) – according to its users and the practices they perform with it – calls for a rethinking of our current epistemological concepts.
In this paper, I propose a theoretical framework and a related terminology to help analyzing the multimodal relationship between objects incorporating music notation (or notational artifacts, as I call them) and their users over time. Based on specific theoretical stances and inspired by Tim Rice’s framework for analyzing musical experience, the structure of my interpretive model is articulated in four parts, each marked by concepts usually coupled together: location and time; surface and space; sight and touch; ideology, function/use, and place.

Reframing textual critical tools within a cultural anthropological approach, notational artifacts can be understood as materials with specific physical and visual features; as triggers for a concrete space of human interaction and a symbolic place of belonging; and as repositories for intellectual and operative contents.

By applying this framework on some examples, I argue for a reconsideration of some crucial cultural practices in the various music-making processes – writing (notation and annotation), material production and alteration, and reading – as well as for a “rematerialization” of how music notation is approached in Western and non-Western contexts. Ultimately, I suggest a shift from the “ethnomusicology of notation” (Schuiling) to an anthropology of notational artifacts.

March 31 2023

The 12th-Century Eastern Mediterranean as a Cross-Cultural Notational Laboratory

Haley Garrick 2022, Presentations of the Symposium

Uri Jacob, Bar-Ilan University

Musicological discourses often divide between “musical notation” as an exclusively Western phenomenon, distinctive from other traditions for providing precise indications of pitch, and other types of visualized musical instruction that involve “musical cues” which are possible to realize only based on preexisting knowledge of the melodic content of a given cue. I would like to challenge this Eurocentric historiographical narrative on pre-modern music by examining the written transmission of melodic content in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean, based on four case studies of visualized musical instruction used in that environment. The first case study will be an excerpt from a Latin liturgical manuscript of the so-called Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre, used by the crusader community established in Jerusalem beginning in 1099. I will demonstrate how the notational vocabulary as well as other visual elements found in this excerpt reflect a mix of differing European traditions that bore new meanings upon their Eastern relocation. The second case study is one of the three Hebrew piyyutim set by Obadiah the Proselyte to Norman notation—unusually written from right to left—of the kind he had probably learned back in his youth in Southern Italy, as part of his clerical education. The two remaining case studies represent two distinct groups of Eastern written sources which include entirely different types of visualized melodic instruction originating in the twelfth century: a Greek liturgical chant set to Middle Byzantine neumes and a 1-page Judeo-Arabic treatise of music theory that visualize melodic formulae using tablature-like textual indications. After briefly presenting these four case studies of visualized musical instruction, I will discuss their shared motivation to transmit precise pitch content and the extent to which it is possible to identify any historical, visual, or conceptual links between them, at times even reflecting aspects of cross-cultural interplay.

March 31 2023

What do We Mean by Musical Notation, Inscription, or Visualization?

Haley Garrick 2022, AMS/SEM/SMT New Orleans

Chair(s): Giulia Accornero (Harvard University), Ginger Dellenbaugh (Yale University)
Discussant(s): Giulia Accornero (Harvard University), Ginger Dellenbaugh (Yale University)
Organized by the AMS Musical Notation, Inscription, and Visualization

Notation has held a central position in all branches of music studies: 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 (distinction between musicology vs comparative musicology, now ethnomusicology). This meeting aims to 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.

The seven ten-minute lightning talks will engage with (but are not limited to) the following questions:

What are the affordances and limits of traditional understandings of “music notation”?

What are examples of notation that challenge the expectations of traditional pedagogies, practices? How can they aid in decentering Western ontologies of analysis and practice?

How can a critique of conventional terminology assist in diversity and inclusion in the field?

How can terms like inscription and visualization expand our concept of written musical systems?

Which epistemological frameworks, methods, practices might assist us in decentering Western canonical understanding of notation?

As music studies have shifted away from the ontological question of “what is music” to focusing to the “how” of music, analogously we suggest that rather than just asking “what is notation” we focus on the innumerable “how” of notation, trusting that the “how” will ultimately guide us toward more inclusive definitions of notation, visualization, inscription.