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Presentations of the Symposium

Music Notation and Analysis in Music Theory Courses

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Shersten Johnson, University of St. Thomas

Music theory courses aim to help students comprehend musical structure so that they can listen more deeply, perform expressively, and compose creatively. Part of the challenge of trying to understand how music is structured, however, is that somehow one must capture the sound-imagery––essentially vibrations of air molecules, which are here one moment and gone the next––in order to measure, divide, and compare components. Because of music’s ephemeral nature, we typically rely on printed scores and other kinds of diagrams of the sound-image, which allow us to consider relationships and patterns outside the pressures of real-time performance.

My presentation will address two outcomes of the reliance on traditional print notation in music theory studies. First, rather than supporting understanding in a neutral way, notation directs attention and biases interpretation. In fact, the distinctions between audible and visible can sometimes blur in our musical theoretical discourse. Additionally, at times score study can reveal relationships that only obtain visually and not necessarily aurally. This paper will discuss several examples of mappings between sound and music notation that are actually quite tenuous and suggest alternative representations. Second, though we have the sense that notation is prosthetic on the sounding music – reducing, clarifying, and thus necessary for understanding – relying on print notation privileges visual comprehension. Dependence on visual representations limits accessibility for some students of music theory (for example those with low vision or dyslexia, or those whose musical experience is based on making music “by ear”). This presentation will address these two unintended consequences and consider complementary ways to understand certain concepts of musical structure through a variety of means.

“I Can’t Read Music”—Music Reading as a Cultural Practice in Popular Music

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Bernhard Steinbrecher, University of Innsbruck

In my paper, I present one part of a joint-cooperation project currently under review for bilateral funding. The whole project carries the title “Reading Music: Modes, Dimensions and Scenes of a Cultural Technique,” aiming to formulate, on the basis of concrete situations and practices, a theory of music reading as a multimodal cultural technique. My own subproject proposal deals with the role and discursification of music reading in popular music, considering that an integral part of the self-promotion of many famous artist personae of popular music concerns their ignorance of traditional musical notation. These ‘reading difficulties’ often appear in the context of an opposing concept that eschews formal training and production principles in favor of increased artistic freedom and authenticity.

This raises several issues regarding genre-typical processes of transmedial transcription between the spheres of the visual, the auditive, and the physical-performative that have as yet been explored only seldom in popular music studies. Research questions concern, e.g., the analytical and reenacting modes and dimensions of music reading in scenes of learning and composition, asking to what extent acts of reading differ according to different popular music genres (specifically rock, electronic dance music, and hip-hop). Moreover, also the sociality dimension of music reading in contexts of performance and interaction is planned to be examined in this subproject, focusing on the role of notation in staging practices, live rituals, and practices of rehearsing and remembering.

In my paper, I outline the cornerstones of my planned project including its mixed-methods approach, striving to stimulate discussion and gain feedback and further ideas from experts in the new AMS Study Group.

Writing Sancaras (Characteristic Phrases) for New Audiences

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Balu Balasubrahmaniyan, Wesleyan University

In the long history of South Indian (Karnatak) music, the concept of notation is almost nonexistent until the 17th century. Although Indian music pedagogy insists on oral tradition, Somanatha’s Raga Vibodha (dated 1609) attempted to create notational symbols for melodic ornaments, known as gamaka. This treatise described instrumental realization on the vina and included musical examples. As the study of Karnatak music became institutionalized, a need for notation arose. In addition to the conventional notation system, my revered guru T.Viswanathan (Viswa) developed a unique system known as descriptive notation, which reveals every detail of any complex phrase of a raga. Although Viswa’s own family tradition relied on oral pedagogy, his notational system had significant impact, particularly among non-Indians wishing to learn intricate melodic aspects of Karnatak music. Viswa’s cousin T. Brinda was critical of his work because she was against sheet music. As a student of both, I was able to understand the methodologies of the two great masters. It was challenging, in the beginning, to understand Viswa’s notation system since I am used to the oral tradition. Later, I understood his motivation to translate one’s understanding of convoluted phrases into a visualization.


Building on the works of his predecessors, such as Oriental Music in European Notation (1893) by Chinnaswami Mudaliar and Sangita Sampradaya Pradarshini (1904) written by Subbarama Dikshitar, Viswa’s study in this area of research is monumental and thorough. He adapted aspects of various music cultures, including some Western music symbols in his notation. He also shared information on the numeric notation system used in Chinese and Indonesian Gamelan music.


In this presentation, I will briefly discuss Viswa’s contribution and demonstrate his descriptive notation in contrast to the conventional notation system. While notation is not capable of capturing the bhava (mood or feeling) of Karnatak music, I will indicate its place in my own practice as a performer and teacher at Wesleyan University. I use audiovisual samples in support of my presentation.

Notation and Inscription: Considering the Tactile

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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