'A repertoire of means for imagining music': notation cultures and the musical imagination

Abstract

Musicologists have traditionally treated music notation as a representation of musical ‘works’. In the performative turn, conversely, it was argued that the score is not the music, and that the lived experience of sound was primary. Neither perspective sheds much light on the actual, practical role of notation in the creative process of performers. Drawing on theories of material culture, this chapter investigates the role of notation in the musical imagination. Employing Cook’s definition of musical culture as a ‘repertoire of means for imagining music’, it outlines a study of notation cultures as a way to approach notation in a performance-orientated music scholarship. Presenting fieldwork results from two case studies, notation for blind and visually impaired musicians and a sign system for conducting improvising ensembles, I question the phenomenological basis for Cook’s account of the musical imagination, which detaches sounds from their material source. Drawing on the work of Alfred Gell, I argue that to hear sound as music is not to detach it from its source, but to engage with it as an indeterminate index of a socio-material infrastructure.