Re-imagining Written Musical Thought: Between Notation, Body, Language
Language reflects thought and thought affects the way a language is structured and used. This reciprocal relationship is fluid and flexible; it carries nonetheless certain patterns of exchange formed through time that have become gradually rigid. In music, Western art music notation is a form of prescriptive language shaped to facilitate communication and express specific notions about music-making that perpetuate a particular understanding of thinking about and doing with one another and with sound. From early graphic or mnemonic traces accompanying oral practices (such as chant traditions) to the highly abstract symbolic systems of Western staff notation, the relationship between sound and its inscription is culturally defined. Yet within artistic research contexts, written notation has the potential to shape, accompany and communicate a process of thinking that seeks to maintain its plasticity and malleability. Using standard Western notation can set limits in certain research contexts, not only in terms of content and expression, but also in interaction with possible research collaborators, as the written reflects the oral and vice versa. Re-imagining written musical thought as a field of possibilities that favours the continual re-shaping of complexity and non-linearity allows for non-rigid outcomes and a reflection of process. The written and the oral constantly inform one another, reinforcing specific epistemic frameworks. This presentation draws historically on examples from a variety of approaches that illustrate parallels in the development of musical making and musical writing, and leads to the proposal of a temporary suspension of the standardisation of musical language. This method offers a way to think beyond notation’s role as an abstract code; instead, language becomes a mapping of human physical experience, prioritising bodily consciousness, physicality, imagination and the dynamics between memory and forgetting, between the concept expressed on paper and the verbally uttered idea, thereby furthering the artistic practice and performance.