Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore a fundamental question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context? Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from musicology, media studies, performance studies, and more, the chapters in this volume offer a wide array of new perspectives that foreground the materiality of music notation. From digital scores to the transmission of manuscripts in the Middle Ages, the volume deliberately disrupts boundaries of discipline, historical period, genre, and tradition, by approaching notation's materiality through four key interrelated themes: knowledge, the body, social relations, and technology. Together, the chapters capture vital new work in an essential emerging area of scholarship.
Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore an essential question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context?
Chapter One: Introduction: Notation and/as material culture
Floris Schuiling and Emily Payne
Part I: Epistemologies of notation
Chapter Two: Was 1974 the End of Music History? Universalism, cybernetics,
and the International Conference of New Musical Notation
Giulia Accornero
Chapter Three: Encyclopaedias and empty staves: Re-reading music in Hanne
Darbovens Quartett 88
Elaine Fitz Gibbon
Chapter Four: Scoring the listener: Notation and representation in acousmatic
music
Patrick Valiquet
Part II: Notation and the body
Chapter Five: The Deaf body beyond music: Music notation by Christine Sun
Kim
Chae-Lin Kim
Chapter Six: Music, notation, and embodiment in early sixteenth-century
Italian pictures
Tim Shephard and Sanna Raninen
Chapter Seven: The work of notation in the visual culture of medieval
devotion
Beth Williamson
Part III: Notation and social relations
Chapter Eight: Jianpu simplified notation and the transnational in musical
repertoires of New Yorks Chinatown
Joseph S. Kaminski
Chapter Nine: Mediating minstrelsy: Notating instrumental identity in
fourteenth-century song
David Maw
Chapter Ten: Inscription, gesture, and social relations: Notation in Karnatak
music
Lara Pearson
Part IV: Notation, instruments, and technology
Chapter Eleven: Digital scores, algorithmic agents, and encoded ontologies:
On the objects of musical computation
Brian A. Miller
Chapter Twelve: Perforating the subject: The player piano rolls of Conlon
Nancarrow
Naomi Woo
Chapter Thirteen: Material bias: David Tudors realisations
You Nakai
Chapter Fourteen: I Feel Love: Music mutation in the electronic age
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
Floris Schuiling is Assistant Professor at Utrecht University. His areas of expertise are modern and contemporary music in the Netherlands, especially improvised and experimental music, and the role of technology and material culture in musical creativity,with a focus on performance practices.
Emily Payne is Lecturer in Music at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include performance studies (particularly of post-war music), creativity, collaboration, embodiment, and materiality.
