Notation and Inscription: Considering the Tactile

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.