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

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.