Material Cultures of Music Notation An Interdisciplinary Conference

Friday 20 – Sunday 22 April, 2018

Utrecht University

Welcome

Welcome to Utrecht University for Material Cultures of Music Notation: An Interdisciplinary Conference! The conference approaches notation not just as a vessel of music-theoretical knowledge, but as an object of social interaction and cultural exchange. It encourages an interdisciplinary approach to a topic that has been at the centre of musicology’s disciplinary identity, by engaging work in media studies, material culture, science and technology studies, and sensory studies. The programme brings together (ethno)musicologists and scholars in other fields working on a variety of forms of musical notation, to reconsider the nature of notation in terms of the mediation of cultural identity, creative agency, and the musical imagination, rather than the representation of musical structure. We’re particularly pleased to welcome our guest speakers, Roger Moseley (Music, Cornell University), Beth Williamson (History of Art, University of Bristol), and Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht University). We’re delighted with the breadth and depth of the programme, and look forward to hearing your contributions and engaging in rich and productive discussions over the next few days. Floris Schuiling, Emily Payne, and Eliane Fankhauser The Conference Committee

The conference is funded through a Veni Postdoctoral Grant offered by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

Contents

Conference schedule at a glance 1

Programme: abstracts Day 1: Friday 20 April 6 Day 2: Saturday 21 April 16

Day 3: Sunday 22 April 25 Contributor biographies 29

Practical information 38 Maps 39

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Conference schedule at a glance

Day 1: Friday 20 April

• Parallel sessions: A sessions will take place in Kannunikenzaal & Sterrecamer; B sessions will

take place in Belle van Zuylenzaal.

• Plenary sessions will take place in Kannunikenzaal + Sterrecamer.

• Tea and coffee breaks will be provided in Sterrecamer.

• Lunches will be provided in Westerdijkkamer.

• Papers last 30 minutes in total (20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of questions).

09:00 Registration (a welcome desk will be open at the Main Entrance of University Hall from 09:00)

10:15 Welcome

10:30–12:30

Session 1A: Materiality (K&S)

Chair: Emily Payne

Session 1B: Identity I (BvZ)

Chair: Tim Shephard Intra-play: Notating for contingent

materiality in open-form works Scott Mc Laughlin (University of Leeds)

Jianpu simplified notation and the transmission of Chinese musical

repertoire in New York’s Chinatown Joseph S. Kaminski (Wagner College, Staten

Island, New York)

Material bias: The nature of David Tudor's scores/instruments

You Nakai (New York University)

Recall notation and twenty-first century orality

Matthew Peattie (University of Cincinatti)

Rolls, techniques, annotations. Notational workflows in Welte-Mignon research

Manuel Bärtsch (Bern University of the Arts HKB)

Musical graphs and the crafting of communal identity in early medieval

Europe Giovanni Varelli (University of Oxford)

Perforating the subject: The Player Piano rolls of Conlon Nancarrow

Naomi Woo (University of Cambridge)

12:30–13:30

Lunch (Westerdijkkamer)

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13:30–15:00

Session 2A: Gender (K&S)

Chair: Laura Dolp

Session 2B: ANT approaches (BvZ)

Chair: Floris Schuiling Encyclopedias and empty staves: Re-reading music in Hanne Darboven’s

Quartett ›88‹ Elaine Fitz Gibbon (Harvard University)

Rehearing common sounds: Pauline Viardot and the ‘intonation’ of artistic

community Sean Gower (University of Cincinatti)

Notation and gender in Beck's Song Reader

Kate Maxwell (University of Tromsø) & Lilli Mittner (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)

Non-human affordance: Towards an emerging aesthetic force in performative

contemporary music Matthew Sergeant (Bath Spa University)

Organized (or deliberate) excess? Notating Salome's transgressive, singing

body Erin McHugh (Royal College of Music)

Objects, agency and Beethoven's late String Quartets

Rachel Stroud (University of Cambridge)

15:00–15:30

Tea/coffee break (Sterrecamer)

15:30–16:30

The work of notation in the visual culture of medieval devotion Beth Williamson (University of Bristol)

(K&S) Chair: Eliane Fankhauser

16:30–1700

Tea/coffee break (Sterrecamer)

17:00–18:30

Session 3A: Iconography (K&S)

Chair: David Maw

Session 3B: Improvisation (BvZ)

Chair: James Saunders Holbein’s hymnal and the cosmology of

place in painting Laura Dolp (Montclair State University)

‘People wrap their lunches in them’: Duke Ellington and his written music

manuscripts Walter van de Leur (University of Amsterdam /

Conservatory of Amsterdam)

Material properties of music books in the art of Renaissance Italy

Sanna Raninen (Uppsala University)

Notation and improvisation Marcel Cobussen (Leiden University)

Embodied notations and notations of embodiment in early sixteenth-century

Italian pictures Tim Shephard (University of Sheffield)

Notation and/as performance: A post-virtual account

Mathias Maschat & Christopher Williams

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Day 2: Saturday 21 April

09:30–11:00

Session 4A: Print cultures (K&S)

Chair: Graeme Boone

Session 4B: Gesture and the body (BvZ)

Chair: Amanda Bayley ‘As Sung by Signor Velluti’: Print culture

and creative provenance in late 1820s London

Sarah Fuchs Sampson (Syracuse University)

Deaf body beyond musical notation: Christine Sun Kim’s Scores and Transcripts

Chae-Lin Kim (Berlin University of the Arts)

The making of a music type: Henri du Tour's typeface for Plantin’s polyphonic

music publications Louisa Hunter-Bradley (Royal Holloway,

University of London) [Delivered by Sanna Raninen]

Notation, gesture, and identity in South Indian art music

Lara Pearson (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics)

Stealing songs, selling melodies: Notation, print and the moral economy of

music-making in nineteenth-century Istanbul

Jacob Olley (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster)

Nikos Skalkottas's innovative notation in the 32 Piano Pieces: A first step to a

gestural analysis Annini Tsioutis (Université Paris Sorbonne)

11:00–11:30

Tea/coffee break (Sterrecamer)

11:30–13:00

Session 5A: Copying (K&S)

Chair: Ruxandra Marinescu

Session 5B: Identity II (BvZ)

Chair: Giovanni Varelli Imagined melody: Medieval song-

notation as a performance practice in several 13th-century old French

chansonniers Nicholas Bleisch (University of Cambridge)

Figure of Force: The concept and (non-) notation of rhythm in the Chinese

traditional nan-kuan music Chieh-Ting Hsieh (Freie Universität Berlin)

The end of music history? Giulia Accornero (Harvard University)

Mediating minstrelsy: Notating instrumental identity in fourteenth-

century polyphonic song David Maw (University of Oxford)

A discussion of the function of music

notation in secular manuscripts c. 1300 Frieda van der Heijden (Royal Holloway,

University of London)

13:00–14:00

Lunch (Westerdijkkamer)

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14:00–15:00

The presence of inscription Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (Utrecht University)

(K&S) Chair: Emily Payne

15:00–15:30

Tea/coffee break (Sterrecamer)

15:30–17:00

Session 6A: Performance cultures (K&S)

Chair: Lara Pearson

Session 6B: Transcription and representation

(BvZ) Chair: Eliane Fankhauser

Textual mediation and musical exoticism: The journey from Śārṅgadeva to

Messiaen Peter Asimov (University of Cambridge)

Sonata of Muybridge's horse galloping Grace Kim (Massachusetts Institute of

Technology)

The role of notation in developing an intercultural performance practice Amanda Bayley (Bath Spa University)

‘Nature has completely denied me a musical ear’: Are musical notes sine

waves, and why (not)? Melle Kromhout (University of Cambridge)

Performers of early music - Self-

fashioning through notation Alon Schab (University of Haifa)

Scoring the listener: Discipline and representation in acousmatic music

Patrick Valiquet (University of Edinburgh)

17:00 Drinks reception (Faculty Club, University Hall)

18:30 Conference dinner (pre-booking required) (Faculty Club, University Hall)

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Day 3: Sunday 22 April

09:30–11:30

Session 7A: Music as performance (K&S)

Chair: Floris Schuiling

Session 7B: Technologies (BvZ)

Chair: Rebekah Arendt Alexander von Schlippenbach and the

question of Total Improvisation Petter Frost Fadnes (University of Stavanger)

Projecting the pen: Real time composition using overhead projection

Harry Whalley (University for the Creative Arts)

Colourful interactions: Composers, theatrical scores, and music as

performance Louis d'Heudieres (Bath Spa University)

Motor learning, perceptual patterns and guitar notation in augmented reality

Amy Brandon (Dalhousie University)

Visualizing improvisational composition: The case of Dark Star

Graeme Boone (Ohio State University)

The impact of networked musical notation technology on the experience of

ensemble music making Ed Hughes, Chris Kiefer & Alice Eldridge

(University of Sussex)

Notating group behaviours James Saunders (Bath Spa University)

Algorithmic agents, encoded ontologies, and digital corpora: On the objects of

computational music theory Brian Miller (Yale University)

11:30–12:00

Tea/coffee break (Sterrecamer)

12:00–13:00

Notation and the networking of musical spacetime Roger Moseley (Cornell University)

(K&S) Chair: Floris Schuiling

Conference ends

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Programme: abstracts

Day 1: Friday 20 April

Session 1A: Materiality

Scott Mc Laughlin (University of Leeds) Intra-play: Notating for contingent materiality in open-form works How do we notate for materiality? The dynamic and unbounded materiality of a sounding object which has its own behaviours and preferences but still allows for endless exploration. The contingency of ‘thingly’ (Jane Bennett) response to performer interaction and stimulation which enacts a materialist extension of Thomas DeLio’s Circumscribing the Open Universe.

How do we notate for an unfolding path? Can a notation be responsive enough to devise a cartography for a landscape that is only revealed as we move across it? (what of dynamic or static notational possibilities?). In a performative context where detail and nuance warp and change over time, what is notation’s purpose? Is it an anchor or a wrecking ball? Can the instrument be its own notation? The instrument as a space, where each piece is a new map differently highlighting properties and their relationships. Is notation then a legend for a multivalent and non-linear space?

This talk will present several of my own works that try to develop notations for these problems. In the context of open-ended performative scores that explore the materiality of the performer-instrument assemblage, allowing the material agency of the instrument to radically guide performer choices. Strategies discussed will encompass the instructional (prose scores, network/flowcharts) to the interpretational (forms of graphic notation), seeking to balance guidance of the performer’s macro/formal decisions with the micro/expressive/performative. You Nakai (New York University) Material bias: The nature of David Tudor's scores/instruments It is well known that John Cage (and others) developed graphic notation with one principal aim in mind: to satiate the interest of the virtuoso pianist David Tudor, also known for his genius at solving puzzles. It is also well known that after a decade of playing the piano, Tudor’s notoriously low threshold of boredom prevailed and he started incorporating electronics to his acoustic instrument, subsequently composing his own works by connecting modular electronics to create an instrumental network which also served as the “score” for his music. What has not been examined is the connection between these two seemingly disparate endeavors, grounded on the idiosyncratic nature of Tudor’s approach to musical scores and instruments. Based on an extensive archival research, this paper analyzes Tudor’s trajectory from realizing the graphic notation of others to composing his own modular electronic compositions, from the conceptual focal point of “material bias.” I observe that Cage’s method of chance operations relied fundamentally on the inherent bias of materials used for composition—from the coins thrown, the imperfections of paper, to the transparencies that performers were asked to manipulate. Tudor took this move from textual/symbolic biasing (in traditional scores) to material biasing seriously. His realizations of graphic notation consisted thoroughly in treating the score as biased material, measuring its size, enumerating its components, overlaying the parts together. In this sense, graphic notation, in the hands of Tudor, started to approximate the material conditions for generating music, which usually goes by the name of “musical instrument.” This approximation of musical scores to the status of instruments was turned inside-out in Tudor’s subsequent foray into electronics, to form his peculiar conception of regarding a network of modular electronic instruments as “scores”—with profound implications for re-thinking the ontology of musical works.

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Manuel Bärtsch (Bern University of the Arts HKB) Rolls, techniques, annotations. Notational workflows in Welte-Mignon research Performance research in recent decades has endeavoured to change our view of scores as the highest authoritative instances for musical interpretation. However, this has resulted in a variety of notational forms that may be no less refined, but that follow other logics and serve aims other than classical notation. This paper focusses on our experience with several research projects into an early reproducing piano system, the so-called Welte-Mignon (used between 1904 and 1928). This system preserves the details of a performance on a paper roll, including note lengths, dynamics and pedalling. This “roll view” has infiltrated our collective visual memory, as can be seen nowadays in every Midi editor. As it is difficult to get reliable measuring results from these old instruments, sophisticated technology is necessary to read the rolls, and this produces a lot of images that follow their own proprietary aesthetics. At the end of the process, the scholar is forced to notate his findings – either as self-referential graphics, or as annotations in the same scores that he had believed to have been made obsolete. This collision of the traditional score with empirical performance notation can be seen as more than a necessary evil: it can be a creative laboratory for experimental, eclectic or expressive notations. Some examples from the practice of the present writer and other scholars show convergences with both very old and very modern notations, offering new, creative solutions and graphics inspired by the technical workflow itself. Naomi Woo (University of Cambridge) Perforating the subject: The Player Piano rolls of Conlon Nancarrow Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, notated on perforated rolls and performed on automated instruments, are easily thought of as purely formal, abstract works, given their technological manifestation and extreme rhythmic complexity. According to this interpretation, the studies are designed to—in Nancarrow’s oft-cited words—‘[get] rid of the performers’, and thus, to eliminate from music the contingencies and frailties of the human body. Others have problematised this notion, addressing the paradoxical closeness to nature that Nancarrow’s technological temporality presents. Instead, I seek nature—as material, embodied, fragile—in the process of composition, rather than in the formal organisation of the pieces themselves.

In particular, by closely examining the procedures of composition that Nancarrow employed— from his methods of sourcing and fixing keyboards and tools, to the onerous physical task of punching holes on the paper—I argue that the piano rolls contain material traces of Nancarrow’s body, the bodies of his assistants and mechanics, and the machines involved in their own making. The relationships involved in the rolls’ perforated notation extend beyond the composer to include a web of human and non-human collaborators. Where Nicholas Cook argues that the scores of ‘New Complexity’ composers such as Brian Ferneyhough ‘embody a relational practice’ by scripting social interactions between performers, I suggest that piano rolls configure similar interactions between non-performer participants. By including non-human participants in these relationships, I then suggest that the notational practice itself permits a kind of subjectivity that rejects liberal humanism and, following Rosie Braidotti, is ‘based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality, and hence community building’. Nancarrow’s posthuman notation, then, does not reject the body, but instead embraces and extends it in a resonant network of social relations.

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Session 1B: Identity I

Joseph S. Kaminski (Wagner College, Staten Island, New York) Jianpu simplified notation and the transmission of Chinese musical repertoire in New York’s Chinatown Jianpu, literally “simplified notation,” has been the most used means of notation among Chinese musicians since the twentieth-century. Its scholarly discussion has been widely overlooked. Jianpu is a numerical notation that uses movable do, wherein 1 is do, 2 is re, and so on, with dots above or below numbers to indicate register, and dashes after numbers to indicate duration. Bar lines are used, and keys are written in letters at the top of the music sheets. A numerical notation was introduced to China by missionaries in the nineteenth-century, and jianpu derived from the Galin-Paris-Cheve system. In New York’s Chinatown, jianpu is used both by professional and amateur musicians to the exclusion of Western notation. Traditional ensembles performing in the parks and brass bands performing at funerals sight read jianpu when learning new songs, or when new musicians join. Cantonese opera singers and their orchestras read jianpu with lyrics written in Chinese beneath the numbers. The jianpu of these local musicians are hand written, photocopied for distribution, and filed in the offices of ensembles who use them. The notations are complex, indicating not only songs’ words, but scores, for 1st trumpet, 2nd trumpet, and euphonium, by writing numbers vertically. Jianpu is a cultural practice transmitting music among Chinese easily and quickly. While songs could be transmitted orally, as they originally were, jianpu facilitates professionals to learn music quickly, as most of them have other jobs and are short on time. Jianpu is an object of social interaction and musical transmission. For New York Chinese, jianpu affirms their identity from other New Yorkers. To an ethnomusicologist, jianpu is not just a musical representation, but a representation of community, and in Chinatown it is a transnational phenomenon. This presentation demonstrates hand written jianpu and the means by which the music is shared. Matthew Peattie (University of Cincinatti) Recall notation and twenty-first century orality This paper explores the interaction of tenth-century recall notation with twenty-first century orality. The earliest witnesses of the Gregorian repertory are preserved in notation that is best suited to singers who already know the melodies. It is written in signs that outline the direction of the melody and indicate the number of notes to be sung to each syllable, but do not provide an exact record of pitch. A remarkable element of the notation is that it records detailed indications of relative weight, intensity, and duration, as well as indications of vocal expression that provide a window into the rich sound world of the medieval singer. The original purpose of the notation is contested in the literature: some scholars believe that it is a description of the repertory as sung by a single cantor; others assert that it was recorded as an aide-mémoire; scholars of Gregorian rhythm treat the notation as a prescriptive guide for performance, while others suggest that these writings are simply the material record of a treasured aural artifact and had limited practical value. I argue that these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and that a single one-dimensional continuum is not adequate to describe the richness of this record.

This paper proposes that recall notation, as an object for study or performance today, is best approached in a predominantly oral context, as living documents that interact with a re-created orality. In my work with singers who have been taught the pitch-content of the melodies, I have discovered that a process of aural learning reveals much that is obscured by translations or transcriptions. The resulting dialogue between the specificity of the texts and the range of interpretive possibilities, allows for a conceptual shift in the study of early notation, and demonstrates how practical inquiry can inform scholarly understanding.

While the phenomenon of parti scannate is testified (albeit indirectly) by several coeval letters and payments for copyists, nowadays they are extremely rare: only a few are extant and no study has never been produced about them. I was able to study two such sets of parts, held in the private Borromeo collection on the Isola Bella (Lake Maggiore), which were cavate from the operas Ama chi t’ama (B. Nencini / A. Melani, Siena 1682) and L’amazone corsara (G. C. Corradi / C. Pallavicino, Venice 1686).

In my presentation I will show the peculiarities of these music sources and their unique notation system. I will ultimately demonstrate how these parti can provide insight into how singers approached both learning and performing their music in seventeenth-century opera.

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Giovanni Varelli (University of Oxford) Musical graphs and the crafting of communal identity in early medieval Europe The study of the earliest music scripts has been focused so far on the investigation of how early techniques for the representation of music functioned, what was their possible origin and what could they tell us about the culture that produced them. In the first half of the ninth-century, the shaping of a system of graphic conventions for the visualisation of cantus – aimed at triggering cognitive responses for the reproduction and recall of melodies from memory – effectively resulted also in the materialisation one of the few aspects of liturgy which until then lacked a visual presence in manuscript transmission.

The great variety of notational types that eventually emerged throughout Europe would appear to be in discordance with the impulses towards a normalisation of liturgy and of its modes of transmission promoted by contemporary Carolingian politics. Regionalism in music writing, for example, may be observed in contrast with the gradual globalisation of Caroline minuscule. What was, thus, conveyed through musical notation and its material media in the early Middle Ages? Would it possible to consider that the seemingly unregulated emergence of diverse music scripts evolved in their visual association with the identities of particular monastic communities?

In my paper, I will argue that the primary role of musical notation in early compilations was not a strictly musical one but constituted a tool to be in authority over the chant repertory itself, and through it of a collective musical memory. As case study, I will observe the notation from the Italian abbey of Nonantola, claiming that this particular type of music script may also have been perceived as an identity trait, preserved over three centuries in order to better define the community’s sense of belonging to a long-standing, independent and powerful institution, thus reinforcing notions of authority and authenticity of liturgical chant.

Session 2A: Gender

Elaine Fitz Gibbon (Harvard University) Encyclopedias and empty staves: Re-reading music in Hanne Darboven’s Quartett ›88‹ A musical notation is employed in the 1989 work of the German visual artist Hanne Darboven, Quartett 88, that radically questions the social conditioning of musical literacy, and points to music’s entanglement in the marginalization of women in the construction and writing of history. Darboven (1941-2009) was preoccupied with the passing of time and in her work questioned the possibilities of writing, capturing and processing the messiness of cultural history. This is particularly evident in her Quartett 88, published in book form in 1990. Quartett 88 is structured according to days of the calendar year 1988 and the birth and death dates of Rosa Luxemburg, Marie Curie, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, who form the eponymous quartet. On nearly every page of the 800-page book, a musical notation is used that upon first glance appears traditional and legible; however, it quickly becomes clear that it lacks a key signature and any para-textual information that might aid in its realization. The notes on the staff – repeated with slight variations on almost every page – are translations of the dates of the year 1988 and are surrounded by other semantic systems of meaning, including the typed word, the handwritten word, and a repeating photograph of an unidentified woman standing beside a stenograph machine. This mute music of time and its accompanying photograph are interrupted occasionally by typed notes taken from encyclopedia entries on the respective quartet members. In my paper, I will perform a close reading of Darboven’s Quartett, showing how the semantic systems of the calendar, musical notation, encyclopedic fact and photographic portraits of the quartet begin to flow into each other, as Darboven uses this meta-data (non)music to question music’s role in the construction of female identity, acts of public and private commemoration and the writing of history.

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Kate Maxwell (University of Tromsø) & Lilli Mittner (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway) Notation and gender in Beck's Song Reader The pop/alternative musician Beck created a stir in the music world when he released his 2012 'album' Song Reader as a book compilation of individual pieces of sheet music and artwork, with an invitation to readers to recreate and upload their recordings of the songs onto the album’s website and YouTube. Two years later, a recording of the songs interpreted by various well-known artists and co-produced by Beck was issued as CD, LP, download, and, for three of the tracks, Vevo videos.

In each of Song Reader’s formats there is a consistent focus not on Beck the songwriter, but on the visual aesthetics of the musical notation. From the album cover art which blends notation and words into a pictorial whole to the ‘official’ videos which roll the notation of the sheet music in time with the songs, the eye, the ear, and the body (re-)create the music work in tandem. Yet these bodies are gendered. Even though Beck’s ‘self’ is (supposedly) obliterated, in the notation, artwork, lyrics, and sounding performances, gender is nevertheless present.

In this article we therefore propose a multimodal reading of Song Reader that addresses the social and cultural aspect of gender through the material aesthetics of the album in its various formats. Through a study of the album sheet music and how selected recordings relate to it, we explore the realisations of these aesthetics and the effect of gender on the meanings thus created and received. Our analysis will consider the particular role of notation in the multimodal assemblage as a whole, and show how gender is an inescapable part of artistic communication. Erin McHugh (Royal College of Music) Organized (or deliberate) excess? Notating Salome's transgressive, singing body In his authoritative overview of Richard Strauss’s orchestral and stage works, Norman del Mar called the music of the final monologue in Salome ‘gloriously sing-able’ (Del Mar 1962). However, this conductor’s astute remark about Salome’s well-written, radiant vocal line is merely passing. Del Mar’s work is consistent with other Strauss scholarship in the mid-twentieth century in that it is a purely textual and tonal analysis of the work. The more recent criticisms of Salome are hermeneutic in nature, and consider the ways in which Salome’s singing body directly comments on male fears about women’s emancipation in fin de siècle Europe (McClary 1991, Kramer 1990, Abbate 1993). In this way Salome’s ‘gloriously sing-able’ vocal music serves a function; be it a manifestation of feminine excess or a means to subjugate.

In this paper, I expand on these readings and analyse the construction of Salome’s vocality in the monologue by way of the notation, exploring the tensions between such score study and the wider criticisms of this transgressive character. In so doing, I use the body’s response to the score as an object of material culture, exploring fin de siècle gender politics alongside the subjective, bodily experiences of the performer.

Of course, historical and contemporary studies of singing practices by large examine the notation of the body such as the laryngeal function and breath markings. A similar bodily analysis of notation has been undertaken by Elisabeth Le Guin in her study of Boccherini's cello music, wherein she describes her embodied readings and resulting methodological roadmap for the dialogue between body, instrument and the score as ‘carnal musicology’ (Le Guin, 2005). It is through the reading of the score alongside the principles of vocal pedagogy, acoustics and my own practice that I offer a similar 'carnal' reading of Strauss's vocal music in the final scene of Salome as another way of understanding fin de siècle constructions of the female body.

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Session 2B: ANT approaches

Sean Gower (University of Cincinatti) Rehearing common sounds: Pauline Viardot and the ‘intonation’ of artistic community This paper widens research on the musical applications of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (Piekut 2014) and on socio-musical approaches (Born 2010; Shelemay 2011; Goehr 1992) by focusing on communal functions of notation in 1840s Paris. Notably, Piekut argues that actor-network theory can generate a more fluid concept of musical context that moves away from the artist-world dichotomy. This paper examines the correspondence and art song of Pauline Viardot as a material means of association for the Romantic artistic community.

To focus on the exchanges in this community, specific attention is drawn to Latour’s principle of group formation: a new social grouping is constantly in flux, new group boundaries are continually being redrawn, and resources brought into play exert their own influences. This perspective is pertinent particularly for musicians of the 1840s, who mobilized their correspondence, criticism, and prose-music works to create community ties with other artists and expand the aesthetic space of art.

Both literary and musical works redraw and contest the boundaries of this emerging group. A reading of the correspondence between Viardot and George Sand reveals threads of aesthetic and ideological dialogue. Then, a similar goal is examined in the six songs of Viardot’s 1843 Album de Mme Viardot-Garcia. The compositional design and paratexts of these songs suggest that social groupings are also being drawn through music.

The culture of notation established by Viardot’s Album asks the listener to identify with the social experience of the artist, creating a dislocation from the text itself. Contrary to the traditional work-concept, which restricts this dislocation by casting the artistic work as an autonomous entity, Viardot’s writing and music evoke a “network space.” The development of her artistic community coincides with a loosening of the self-referentiality of notation, a move towards metaphor, and the notation of inter-media artistic aesthetics. Matthew Sergeant (Bath Spa University) Non-human affordance: Towards an emerging aesthetic force in performative contemporary music This paper reads certain emergent tropes in twenty-first century music through the lens of the contemporaneous ‘material turn’ (Barrett & Bolt 2010) in critical theory, deriving a notion of non-human affordance as an emerging aesthetic force within the field.

Holding a diverse group of contemporary thinkers together (e.g Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Maneul DeLanda and Quentin Meillassoux, amongst many others), if the ‘new materialism’ (Iris van Tuin 2011) of this ‘material turn’ holds any consistency, it is that ‘matter is no longer imagined […] as a massive, opaque plenitude but is recognized instead as indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways. One could conclude accordingly that matter “becomes” rather than matter “is”’ (Coole & Frost 2010). From such a perspective, activities upon the concert platform can be understood as an entwinement or ‘intra-action’ (Barad 2007) of human and non-human agencies, where the matter of the musical instrument itself is an ‘actant’ (Latour 2004).

Read through such reconceptualization, the paper argues for a re-understanding of twenty-first century musical trends involving the frequent (re-)emergence of the use of non-standard instruments, objects and so-called ‘low-fi’ technology within performative contemporary art music. Examining evidence from the instrumental and notational practices of a wide range of contemporary artists (including but not limited to Hanna Hartman, Michelle Lou, Mauricio Pauly, Michael Pisaro and Simon Steen-Andersen), the paper identifies a connective conceptual thread where human performative actions are re-appropriated as a form of affordance to the non-human domain, offering a kind of ‘playground space’ to agential matter – a place for it to move and be foregrounded.

As such, the notion proposed in this paper draws together hitherto only superficially connected (cf. Rutherford-Johnson 2017) areas of music-making and serves as further demonstration of the impact already felt on contemporary art music by new materialist thought.

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Rachel Stroud (University of Cambridge) Objects, agency and Beethoven's late String Quartets In the words of Alfred Gell, ‘Art objects are characteristically difficult. They are difficult to make, difficult to ‘think’, difficult to transact. They fascinate, compel, entrap, as well as delight the spectator’ (Gell, 1998: 23). Beethoven’s late quartets, widely regarded as his most elusive and difficult compositions, have ‘compelled’, ‘entrapped’ and ‘delighted’ the imaginations of performers, composers and audiences alike for nearly two centuries. This paper will first examine a potentially material basis for such fascination through an exploration of Beethoven’s idiosyncratic uses of notation in the quartets and how such visual eccentricity has influenced the material forms in which the quartets have been used, disseminated and consumed. For example, the late quartets were the first string quartets to be published simultaneously in score form as well as parts – a crucial material and ontological shift with far-reaching ramifications for the future practice and study of WAM.

The second part of this paper shifts the location of ‘agency’ from work, composer and performer to the notational objects themselves: how do the objects representing the late quartets – scores, editions, parts – perform? Drawing upon the theoretical writings of Bruno Latour and Alfred Gell, this paper considers the possibility of an ethnography of ‘performing’ notational objects. This raises questions concerning our treatment of, and different social interactions with, notational objects. Many musical scores are written on: performers inscribe agency and temporary ownership of the object through pencil markings. Other notational objects are revered, preserved and protected. A leather-bound volume of first-editions parts of Beethoven’s late quartets is freighted with literal and metaphorical weight; yet the very same notational source printed off on mass-produced A4 paper, or viewed on an iPad, performs a different set of values. How does the materiality of the object itself affect and configure our social interactions with it? Do we have an ethical obligation to the musical score? Or, after Latour, do the objects themselves hold in place creatively stagnant discourses concerning the putative ‘intentions’ of the composer and the subservience of the performer to the Work?

Beth Williamson (University of Bristol) The work of notation in the visual culture of medieval devotion

Accounting for reactions to, and receptions of, the visual and material culture connected with medieval religious activity had, until fairly recently, been a matter of thinking about what individuals saw, and how they saw it. Lately, however, art historians and others have been concerned to open up their assessments of religious culture to senses other than that of sight. To some extent this has been a matter of seeking additional and multi-layered ‘context’ for an experience that is understood as still largely visual. Questions have been asked about how the sounds of the medieval liturgy – music, speech, bells, and other sounds – affected the ways in which people saw images, buildings, and other artefacts. In such a model of enquiry one might ask how an individual’s experience of hearing a Marian antiphon, such as Salve Regina, being sung in a church might affect their understanding of, for example, a painting or a stained glass window depicting the Virgin as Queen of Heaven. Besides this kind of approach, however, other historians of medieval religion have begun to think about the ways in which music is sometimes embedded into instances of visual and material culture in the form of musical notation. Most obviously we find the combination of musical notation and visual imagery in manuscripts. Music and image are placed together on the pages of illuminated manuscripts, but all too often art historians have largely ignored the music, and analysed the images qua images, without considering the notation as part of the user’s overall experience of the book. Musical notation also appears in panel paintings, and stained glass, among other instances of visual culture. It is all too easy to underestimate the work that musical notation does as part of the visual ensemble of a painting or other image. If we treat the sounding music of a sung Marian antiphon as mere ‘context’ or ‘background’ to the visual experience, we underplay the richness of the relationship between the two; similarly, we misjudge the work that musical notation is doing as part of an image, if we treat it as mere ‘decoration’, or visual embellishment. Using examples mainly from thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Europe this lecture will examine notation as part of some key examples of visual culture. It will consider the work that notation does in the context of paintings and other such images, in stimulating memory, forming new thoughts and images in the mind, and in controlling the ways in which the imagery is seen. Besides the visual work that notation does in these contexts, we will see that it does not only appeal to the physical sense of sight, but also to the inner senses, and therefore addresses additionally the individual’s sense of sound, but through the eye, silently, and inwardly.

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Session 3A: Iconography

Laura Dolp (Montclair State University) Holbein’s hymnal and the cosmology of place in painting This paper presents one area of my research that explores the relationship between cartography and the ontologies and material history of musical scores. In a forthcoming book, I develop a series of case studies where, like maps, musical scores have often been the objects of semantic and symbolic experiences.

This paper draws on one such study, involving the sixteenth-century iconography of musical scores. More specifically, it considers the representation of a hymnal in Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533), the now-iconic portrait of wealth and power depicting two young French aristocrats in the court of Henry VIII. Beyond its human subjects, much of the painting’s existing mythology has involved the iconography and placement of its material objects – a lower shelf associated with the terrestrial world and an upper shelf representing the heavens and their celestial bodies.

Holbein’s placement of the Lutheran hymnal on the lower shelf, between his two Catholic subjects, has been interpreted generally as a gesture of religious tolerance and outreach, loosely related to the other musical objects, like the lute and the flutes, but standing apart from the other scientific instruments that adorn both shelves. My paper reconsiders these assumptions on two counts. First, I illustrate how the hymnal has more specific meanings, since Protestant music publications varied significantly in content, form, and function. Second, I propose that the hymnal represented both the vernacular practice of print culture as well as a reimagining of the divine; practices that were not unrelated to the terrestrial and celestial globes. As evidence of a historical soundscape, I suggest how the presence of notated music evokes a specific acoustical ecology in Holbein’s work, one that delineates sacred from profane, Catholic from Protestant, literate from non-literate, but also the more porous boundaries between the congregation and representatives of the church. These boundaries are characterized by a fluid liturgical space, rather than a more permanent sacral ideal. Sanna Raninen (Uppsala University) Material properties of music books in the art of Renaissance Italy The surviving music sources from the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries display a wide variety of formats and sizes, ranging from large institutional choirbooks to small handheld sets of partbooks. The advent of music printing around the same time did not revolutionise the physical properties of music books, but it further expanded the amount of books in circulation and use. While depictions of instruments have caught the attention of research in music iconography, music books have received less attention, and are usually evaluated mainly by the accuracy of any notation displayed.

References to music in Renaissance art are often achieved by depicting musical instruments and also by books containing music; in particular, the images of singing are emphasised by the presence of a book or a sheet of paper containing notation. The link between the artistic depiction of musical performance and actual performance practice is not usually immediate, and often music and items relating to it act as symbolic devices: music books communicate aspects of identity of the sitter, or the dynamics between both subjects depicted and the viewer. Considering the variety in the physical properties on music books at the time, how are the music books depicted in works of art and how are individuals shown engaging with the books? Aside from performance, what properties can the book of music convey in the image, and how does it affect the context they are viewed in?

My presentation examines the different formats and function of music books presented in the art of Italian Renaissance through the perspective of the material culture of books.

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Tim Shephard (University of Sheffield) Embodied notations and notations of embodiment in early sixteenth-century Italian pictures Music emphatically entered the repertoire of popular subjects for painting and printmaking in North Italy in the early sixteenth century. Contemporary accounts report the perception of ‘harmony’ that results from viewing them, where harmony is understood as diversity brought into accord, a musical practice but also a metaphor broadly applicable to the self, love, family, the state, and indeed the universe as a whole.

Musical scores often appear in such images, offering an interesting opportunity to reflect on the materiality of notation, not least because musical functionality cannot have been their primary purpose. From a practical perspective these are bad scores: upside-down, half-obscured, foreshortened, often simply illegible. And yet they are represented, and indeed both their material and their musical structure act powerfully to shape the actions and interactions of the figures in the image. Those actions and interactions simultaneously embody the music’s role within the symbolic economy of the picture.

Monastic choirs, looking upward together at a service book placed on a monumental lectern, are constrained to act out the intended outcome of their song—to turn the face, mind and senses upward toward the divine in a catholic (i.e. collective, universal) act of worship. Smaller ensembles crowd round to read from a small choirbook or single sheet, bodies pressed together, touching one another on the shoulder or arm, exchanging glances, the practical challenges of their musical score forcing them to embody the harmonious community and collaboration that animate the picture and impress themselves upon its viewer. Invisible notation, in books turned away from the viewer, is nonetheless made partly intelligible through the very bodily morphology of the ensemble members: the heavy-set, balding bass, the tenor in vigorous middle-age, the beautiful young soprano.

This paper will consider the forms of musical embodiment that arise from the interaction between people and scores in this body of images.

Session 3B: Improvisation

Walter van de Leur (University of Amsterdam / Conservatory of Amsterdam) ‘People wrap their lunches in them’: Duke Ellington and his written music manuscripts Throughout his career, Ellington often referred to the process of writing music. He left an impressive body of autograph music manuscripts, the larger share currently housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Yet the few texts that do refer to Ellington’s written music tend to downplay its importance and relevance. In Jazz, (2009), a college textbook, Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins maintain that “[n]o permanent record survives for Ellington’s music, which was reconceived whenever new soloists entered the band. … He [Ellington] knew his music could not be contained by notation.”

Such mystifications misrepresent both the high level of detail in Ellington’s autograph scores—of which a massive amount survived—as well as the role that these documents played in his composition techniques. True, the connection between his manuscripts and the performances and recordings of the Ellington orchestra is far from straightforward, but that does not render them irrelevant.

In this paper, I will argue that Ellington’s autographs reveal how notation helped him to shape and develop his ideas, and how they enabled him to handle large and complex textures, sounds and structures. By working in a written medium, Ellington, like any other composer who uses notation, engaged in dialogue with the written text. His scores may carry crossed-out sections, inserts, and later additions and revisions. In rehearsals, he tended to further edit his music, moving sections around, adding others, and at times exchanging musician’s parts. Therefore, the orchestra’s recordings more often than not do not follow the notated music verbatim. I argue that his editing is an integral part of Ellington’s compositional strategies, and that it fully relied on the presence of written music. Notation was central to Ellington’s working methods.

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Marcel Cobussen (Leiden University) Notation and improvisation Taking into account my claim that improvisation is an inextricable part of all music making, the question becomes pertinent as to how the score relates to improvisation. Posing this question implies that I do not regard improvisation exclusively as a strategy of radical transformation, of pursuing the unfamiliar, and of radical innovation; rather, improvising may be regarded as being active, pro-active, and re-active in a specific situation without being led exclusively by unbreakable rules, rigid routines, and pre-established structures.

Most music scholars agree on the idea that improvisation has almost completely disappeared from Western classical music, at least since the (late) eighteenth century. (Moore 1992; Bailey 1993; Sawyer 2008) However, performer of this music are required to do much more than simply reproducing what is written down. From relatively modest interventions, such as filling in dynamics or ornamentation, to the “quasi-improvisational” elaboration of cadenza’s, scores often require an amount of flexibility, creativity, and complicity from the performer in order for justice to be done to the compositions. In short, performers are somehow invited, invited by the very act of music making, to negotiate all kinds of musical contingencies.

Hence, the reading of a score cannot in the end result in some universal, verifiable, and demonstrable truth but is permeated by – what Derrida would call – a fundamental undecidability. Despite or thanks to this undecidability, performers are forced to make choices; they cannot not choose. Performing becomes “improvising […] on the music that [performers, MC] play” (Benson 2003: 123). Musical notation can only give the performer a hint; she must constantly solve all kinds of “problems,” thus escaping fixed rules, saving the music from petrification, and employing her creative forces. Mathias Maschat & Christopher Williams Notation and/as performance: A post-virtual account This presentation is a live adaptation of a book chapter entitled “Three Performances: A Virtual (Musical) Improvisation” (Maschat and Williams 2016). That text interweaves a verbal/graphic score (the “transcription” of a recorded musical improvisation by the authors) and an analysis of same. Drawing on theories of reader-response criticism (Iser 1972) and performativity (Fischer-Lichte 2012), we reflexively argue that “liveness” (Auslander 2008) is present in the act of reading the score even after the initial event has passed, and even before it is performed out loud. Reading here is a virtual improvisation with the score/text, in the reader’s imagination.

At the conference, we will read aloud an adapted version of “Three Performances”, incorporating fragments of the “original” audio recording, images of the score, and projected written text. This post-virtual performance (i.e. now in physical and social space) is meant both to extend and recontextualize the chapter’s central claim that notation, beyond prescribing and preserving musical works for instrumental realization, can constitute a performance in its own right.

In this way we link two topics proposed by the conference – notation and performance, and notation and knowledge. Specifically, we address the following questions:

• How might notation, performance, and improvisation be entangled rather than opposed?

• What does it mean to “read” music and how is musical literacy socially and culturally conditioned?

In response to the first question, we provide a concrete example and offer principles that can be generalized to other cases of experimental music. We also look forward to opening up the second question with conference attendees in ways that go beyond what can be accomplished in written media alone.

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Day 2: Saturday 21 April

Session 4A: Print cultures

Sarah Fuchs Sampson (Syracuse University) ‘As Sung by Signor Velluti’: Print culture and creative provenance in late 1820s London On June 30, 1825, Giovanni Battista Velluti made his debut at the King’s Theatre, the first castrato to perform on the London stage in more than twenty-five years. English audiences were captivated by the singer’s creativity, especially his penchant for vocal ornamentation, and sheet-music publishers capitalized on this fascination by issuing nearly thirty piano-vocal scores bearing traces of the castrato’s performance practices. Through a close examination of these printed sources, this paper examines how such scores memorialized and made possible acts of co-creation between composer, castrato, and consumer, even as they amplified critics’ anxieties over creative authorship.

Several of the scores in question advertised themselves as souvenirs of the castrato’s performances, integrating the singer’s ornaments into the composer’s vocal line to indicate that the printed page reflected what had occurred in real time and, in so doing, affirming the collaborative nature of operatic performance. Many more featured extensive passages of alternative embellishments printed on separate ossia lines, at least some of which the singer had been commissioned to compose. These ossia scores acknowledged the agency of composer and castrato alike, while opening up space for other authorial voices: as the many handwritten revisions strewn throughout archival copies of these scores reveal, amateur singers engaged in creative acts of their own, whether by adjusting Velluti’s embellishments to work for their voices or by adding ornaments in keeping with his style to the composer’s original melody.

Such scores crystallized in print a set of co-creative practices that were widely accepted by audiences, performers, and composers, but which disquieted English critics increasingly eager to attribute authorial control to the composer alone. Ultimately, I suggest that the sheet-music industry (and print culture more broadly) prompted this critical preoccupation with sole authorship—even as it provided new means of remembering, imagining, and participating in collaborative music-making. Louisa Hunter-Bradley (Royal Holloway, University of London) The making of a music type: Henri du Tour's typeface for Plantin’s polyphonic music publications The Officina Plantiniana was regarded as one of the most important and influential printing and publishing houses in the second half of the sixteenth century, not only in the Low Countries but also more broadly within Europe. Owned and run by Christopher Plantin and his heirs, the publications of the Officina Plantiniana were known for their high quality of presentation and, in particular, the clarity and excellence of the typefaces used. The extant correspondence and archival records of the Officina Plantiniana provide us with our most important clues in reconstructing the various elements of the printing history of this business, and in this particular case can shed new light on the commissioning and production of music type in the early modern period.

Utilizing the existing correspondence and account records at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, I shall analyse the process and schedule whereby the Officina Plantiniana commissioned Du Tour's Grande Musique typeface, in 1576 for the publication of polyphonic music in its highly ornate grand-folio choir books. By analysing specific letters between Henri du Tour and Christopher Plantin, as well as archival entries regarding work undertaken and payments made, rare facts come to light regarding the time taken to produce music type; technical considerations made within the commissioning process; and costs associated with commissioning music type.

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Jacob Olley (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster) Stealing songs, selling melodies: Notation, print and the moral economy of music-making in nineteenth-century Istanbul During the long nineteenth century, notation became an increasingly important part of musical life in Ottoman Istanbul. Following the reforms of Byzantine and Armenian church notation in the 1810s, and the establishment of a western-style imperial music school in 1832, music writing became more accessible and more widely practiced amongst the various confessional communities of the empire. However, while some Ottoman musicians and intellectuals were zealous advocates of notation, believing it to be an instrument of progress and modernization, others were skeptical about its supposed benefits. Indeed, the use of notation was viewed by some as potentially harmful to the interests of teachers and students, since it disrupted the ‘moral economy’ of musical transmission, which, in a predominantly oral music culture, was based on a system of close personal ties, ethical obligations and social distinctions. Relatedly, notation was frequently used not to standardize repertories or to make musical education more systematic and accessible, as the reformists had hoped, but to ‘steal’ or conceal valuable repertoire from other musicians.

Debates about the technical suitability of different notation systems for writing Ottoman music thus touched upon deeper questions of morality, professional jealousy and intercommunal relations. At the same time, the spread of print technology transformed the musical economy of Istanbul, as the market for musical knowledge and repertoire expanded beyond a limited circle of initiates to encompass an emerging multilingual and multi-confessional urban bourgeoisie. This paper examines the intersection between writing practices, print capitalism and the ethics of musical transmission, and argues that the adoption or rejection of different systems of notation depended not on their merits as techniques of encoding, but on their integration into wider socio-economic and cultural processes in the late Ottoman Empire.

Session 4B: Gesture and the body

Chae-Lin Kim (Berlin University of the Arts) Deaf body beyond musical notation: Christine Sun Kim’s Scores and Transcripts Is it possible that musical notations embody or embrace deaf people? The sound artist Christine Sun Kim who is (born) deaf uses musical symbols and elements of American Sign Language (ASL) which is her first language to create her ‚music‘ on paper. Kim’s ‚music‘ is essentially referred to her own body -more precisely- its movement and its articulation. The lines that she draws are -in her view- equivalent to ‚sound‘ that she (or her body) makes. And this is the very reason why she, for instance, prefers four lines for a staff which should (re)present the movement of her hand: „A typical staff contains five lines. Yet for me, signing it with my thumb sticking up […] doesn’t feel natural. That’s why you’ll notice in my drawings, I stick to four lines on paper.“ And besides, musical notes, dynamic symbols and verbal connotations are combined with the grammar of sign language and also with her own sound experiences in the musical (con-)text.

Kim’s works that lie literally beyond hearing show the opportunity and possibility to involve deaf body in musical notation, too. Here, it should be pointed out that musical notations are usually invisibly connected to our ear, comparable to the written language which is indeed an visual object, but it is undoubtedly linked to the spoken language that has to be heard (that’s why most of deaf people have problems in reading and writing the spoken language). The hearing ability is taken for granted in both cases. Therefore Kim´s works challenge at the same time the unquestioned relationship between musical notation and hearing body. Why should there be -always and only- the hearing body as a norm beyond musical notation or even music in general?

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Lara Pearson (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics) Notation, gesture, and identity in South Indian art music In this paper I examine the roles of notation and physical gesture in the transmission and performance of Karnatak music: a style of art music performed in South India. Drawing on my research in India, I show how notation and gesture in this style constitute intertwined modes through which musical information is conveyed, combining symbolism and kinetic iconicity. Furthermore, I explore the ways in which the particular qualities of the notation afford improvisation in the style. Finally, I examine the attitudes of musicians towards the materiality of notation and physicality of gesture, looking at the role each can play in constructing relations between teacher and student and the forging of musical lineages.

Karnatak music employs a schematic form of notation that indicates only pitch position and approximate duration. Other elements, including ornamentation, rhythmic precision, and emphasis/de-emphasis are transmitted orally. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which physical gestures are used to convey musical qualities through iconicity in both pedagogic and performance contexts. In addition, I explore how the schematic nature of the notation affords improvisation in the style. Although printed notation does exist in India, teachers usually prefer to impart their own versions of compositions to their students, which are typically written out by hand during lessons. Thus, notation acts not only as a representation of the composition but also as a record of the moment in which it was written and of the relationship between teacher and student. This paper will consider such handwritten notation and also the gesturing habits that are passed from teacher to student as material and bodily cultures. Drawing on interviews with teachers and students in India, I show how such material and bodily traditions can contribute to musicians’ sense of identity and position within a lineage.

Annini Tsioutis (Université Paris Sorbonne) Nikos Skalkottas's innovative notation in the 32 Piano Pieces: A first step to a gestural analysis Composed in 1940, the 32 Piano Pieces by Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas are a challenge to any pianist undertaking their study. The pieces all bear titles indicating their character and/or mood and are of considerable technical difficulty, but more importantly the correct rendering of the music makes real physical demands on the interpreter. The multiplicity of different types of articulation, accents, touchers, and other techniques (such as glissando), as well as interpretation indications written in the score by the composer are but one aspect of the work’s complicated notation. Skalkottas also makes innovative use of conventional symbols in order to create and express a new sound world. This paper proposes a fresh reading of the score of the 32 Piano Pieces, reflected in and paralleled with the text of the Prologue to the work, where the composer explicitly states his desire to innovate and create a new way of playing. With specific examples from pieces spanning the whole collection, we aim to show that the key to the new sound world proposed by Skalkottas is to be found in a purely physical gestural-based approach to the work, the first step being the definition of the gestures used, their recognition and categorization. The final part of the paper proposes a short preview of the next step in the proposed analysis of Skalkottas’s pieces, in the form of the application of the above gestural analysis to the formal segmentation of the work (on a selection of pieces) with specific examples illustrating instances of coincidence and non-coincidence of the two analytical outcomes.

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Session 5A: Copying

Nicholas Bleisch (University of Cambridge) Imagined melody: Medieval song-notation as a performance practice in several 13th-century old French chansonniers This paper examines how 13th-century scribes conceived of melody and its relationship to text. Its premise, a respect for the intellect of notators and an interest in their practice, contrasts with the typical view of scribes as an inconvenient barrier between modern editor and medieval singer. My focus is the frequent phenomenon of realizing a metrically regular textual line with an irregular number of musical “syllables.” Instead of attributing this to copy-error, I propose a challenge to our preconceptions of how notation relates to performance, and perhaps even how medieval singers imagined and learned their own renditions.

Modern transcriptions tend to hide these metrically irregular musical verses. A basic editorial principle is to adapt the number of notes to the number of syllables. Many editors have resorted to deleting or even inserting notes, supposedly added or omitted by incompetent scribes. The a priori justification: having more notes than syllables implies an unsingable melody. This statement reveals a core assumption about the relationship of notation to performance.

This paper considers examples from trouvère chansonniers M, R, and V, which imply a different way of imagining melody from what modern editors are used to. They may also offer a different way of conceptualising notation. Copying itself is a kind of performance, one that cannot be perfectly replicated and cannot be (easily) corrected after the fact. By examining the same melody across manuscript ‘families’, and different melodies for the same text, I will show that these ‘errors’ must have existed already at the earliest stage of transmission. They most likely to relate to transcription from sound, not copying from a score and thus point to the tenuous link between sound and its representation on parchment. Giulia Accornero (Harvard University) The end of music history? 25 October 1974 marked the end of music history as we know it. Or did it? That day was the last of the four-‐day International Conference on New Musical Notation, hosted by the University of Ghent, where eighty-‐four experts from all around Europe, the American continent and Israel were invited. This event was part of the grandiose project: The Index of New Musical Notation. The goal of this New-‐York based enterprise was to research, categorize, and, ultimately, establish a universal notation lexicon that could provide the basis for a universal music history. Once the foundation for an international vehicular system of (musical) signs was laid, “Music” could appear, circulate, and be exchanged in a univocal meaning once and for all. Kurt Stone, the man behind the project, justified this endeavor with pragmatic reference to the need to create standardized scores, as the work of a “conscientious music editor,” as Stone understood his job. In the year 28 A.D. (after Darmstadt), when myriad systems of musical notation for New Music had been invented and refined, this could have seemed a reasonable aim. Nonetheless, its articulation is not without problems once it becomes clear that it can operate only on the condition that a certain model of the historical presentation of music is accepted.

In the conference report, new forms of notation are regarded as tools “for conveying the composers’ musical ideas.” The system seems thus to grant a certain flexibility to accommodate the “composer’s creativity”; more, it acknowledges its natural swerve, what Stone calls the esthétique de l’ambiguité, that is, all those new notations that, leaving space to the performer’s discretion, eliminate the very possibility of codification, that is a univocal relationship between sign a message. Yet, within the idea of a universal notation there is a singular historical trajectory that recognizes among its possibilities only that which can be codified. A swerve from this trajectory is surely imaginable, but only to ultimately disappear as insignificant, insofar as it cannot be codified. In other words, the composer’s freedom is guaranteed, but only at one condition: codifiability. Thus tamed, notational tools can be eligible to update a preexisting imaginary catalogue where what is notation, music, and their relationship has already been established and out of discussion. Paraphrasing Belting (1983), we can say that such an history, while studying notation as a vehicle of representation, represents—indeed, defines—what music is. However, the conference ended inconclusively. Despite the print of the volume Music Notation in the Twentieth Century (Stone, 1980), composers kept imagining new relationships between the act of leaving a mark and the manifestation of sound. The stakes of this project were high, as its risks. What could

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have been the ultimate accomplishment of this history of notation, turned out to be the showcase of its failure and of the historical mode of thinking at its foundation.

In this paper, I will scrutinize the significance of the 1974 conference, paying as much attention to its underlying aesthetic creed as to its bureaucratic mode of operation. In doing so, I will attempt to shed some light on both reasons and consequences of its underlying historical mode of presentation, particularly in its relation to the avant-‐garde. Only once emancipated from the paradigm of a processual history of music, notation can offer bridges to explore a story of music’s fragmentary and provisional realities.

Session 5B: Identity II

Chieh-Ting Hsieh (Freie Universität Berlin) Figure of Force: The concept and (non-) notation of rhythm in the Chinese traditional nan-kuan music In comparison to the notation of the Western art music which is based on the proportion of duration, it appears that the duration of beat is not indicated in the traditional notation of Chinese nan-kuan music, aka. nan-yin, which is one of the most ancient music traditions, is extremely obscure. Although the position of the beat is indicated in the nan-kuan notation, the duration of beat is often changeable in performance. It therefore brings up the question of how to recognize the time to beat and know the rhythm. Through the re-examination of some of the ancient Chinese writings on rhythm, I argue that the rhythm of nan-kuan and the way the beat is indicated in the notation reflect the close interrelation between the rhythm and poetic rhyme, the beat and punctuation in the ancient Chinese musical and poetic traditions. Moreover, I argue that the rhythm of nan-kuan music is not based on the proportion of duration of beat but the dynamics, which I define as the changes of the tones of different instruments that come from the different forces which the musicians use while performing the music. Like the other Chinese traditional music, e.g. ancient zither music, the sense of force is essential to the sense of rhythm. It is through the sense of the interactions of the forces that one can recognize the time to beat and know the rhythm. The rhythm is therefore not the predetermined form as much as the figure which is being formed under the interactions of the forces. As rhythm is the figure which is being changed, it is interesting to reflect on the question of whether the notation which appears to be obscure is also the non-notation for the force in rhythm which requires listening more than the notation. David Maw (University of Oxford) Mediating minstrelsy: Notating instrumental identity in fourteenth-century polyphonic song Musical notation in the European tradition was created first of all to serve the needs of the church. It reinforced a hierarchy of social values: church music over secular; vocal music over instrumental. The singers of sacred vocal music were literate and held the status of educated clerks. Instrumentalists (minstrels) were not taught to read music and were held in low esteem. Liturgical song was eternal, fixed and unchanging through notation. Instrumental music was ephemeral improvisation.

The adoption of musical practice by university culture in the thirteenth century changed the nature and use of musical notation, challenging established social structures. Notational developments focused on the rhythmic control of polyphonic composition, exploring as the century progressed shorter note-values. The theorist now known as Anonymus IV noted the connection of such rhythms to the playing of instrumentalists. Notational development was gradually enabling the writing of instrumental music. It precipitated the wholescale reformulation of the rhythmic system in the fourteenth-century Ars nova.

By the fourteenth century, a process of social integration had begun: minstrels had their own guild. Yet, their status as social outliers remained. Lawrence Gushee (1973) noted that certain aspects of the musical construction of Guillaume de Machaut’s polyphonic songs suggested the influence of unnotated minstrel music. This paper picks up that suggestion to explore the way in which the resources of the period’s notation helped mediate different positions in the social hierarchy of music. Fourteenth-century polyphonic song may be viewed as a site for the confrontation of different social strata, in particular the extremes: the aristocratic audience and the performing minstrel. By memorialising the work of the minstrel in fixed, notated musical composition, composers elevated their social status. Minstrelsy was no longer ephemeral improvisation, but creative thought of lasting value.

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Frieda van der Heijden (Royal Holloway, University of London) A discussion of the function of music notation in secular manuscripts c. 1300 Musical literacy in the Middle Ages lagged behind other literacy, and many owners of chansonniers cannot be assumed to have been able to read music notation. With this in mind, we should wonder what the function of notation was in such manuscripts. To answer this question, we will need to look into the purpose of secular music books in the Middle Ages: who were the intended owners, how familiar were they with the songs in the manuscript, were these songs performed, by whom, and if they were, were they performed from the book? These are questions that are important in our understanding of chansonniers and indeed of vernacular music in the Middle Ages.

In this paper, I will address these questions in light of three case studies: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, français 12615 (the Noailles chansonnier), a fully notated chansonnier from the fourth quarter of the thirteenth century, français 12786, a manuscript from the early fourteenth century containing a song collection that never received the intended (polyphonic) music notation for which large spaces are left blank, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308 (the Oxford chansonnier), a large chansonnier from the first quarter of the fourteenth century that was never meant to contain any notation at all. Because these three manuscripts deal with music notation in such different ways, together they provide the opportunity to gain more insight into the function of notation in medieval secular music manuscripts.

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (Utrecht University)

The presence of inscription Why are we interested in materiality and material culture today? Why are inscription technologies like print, handwriting, or music notation that were once taken for granted as part of our perceptual framework now objects of academic inquiry and analysis?

Taking a comparative approach, I show how the concepts of matter, materiality, and presence have evolved from the 1950s—the dawn of the late electronic age—into a set of markers for a platform of converging methods and perspectives we call the material turn. This turn, I explain, is a circular rather than a linear turn and both theory- and practice-based—perhaps even practice-led. To illustrate my point, I zoom in on the literary uses of aluminium disc and magnetic tape-recording in the earlier and mid-20th century. This case study allows me to uncover a crucial phase in the history of Western inscription technology that, starting in the 19th century, loosens the status of alphabetic script as the dominant cultural medium. This modification, as we know, continues into the digital age, when alphabetic script will have become a technical image: an effect of digital code.

The specific uses of recording technologies in 20th-century poetic practice and poetic research—think of Albert B. Lord’s and Milman Parry’s The Singer of Tales—enabled historians and media theorists of the 1950s and ‘60s to forge new stories about the coming into being of alphabetic script, and some sort of alphabetic imagination. Indeed, the so- called return of orality and oral literary modes in the electronic age inspired a good deal of the media theories we are still working with today, within the parameters of a material turn. I propose the hypothesis that the orientation towards an electronic and digital future in these theories, and the desire to work through that projected future, is in fact a turn backwards to understand the implications of the introduction and ends of alphabetic script.

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Session 6A: Performance cultures

Peter Asimov (University of Cambridge) Textual mediation and musical exoticism: The journey from Śārṅgadeva to Messiaen Nineteenth-century imperial knowledge-gathering and -collation stimulated European studies of music outside the Western Art tradition. Whether based on travelers’ song collections or ancient musical treatises, such studies frequently relied upon transcriptions and adaptations into contemporary Western notation. Having filtered sound through this inscriptive mechanism, scholars applied philological and comparative methodologies borrowed from linguistics to derive theoretical, historical, and even biological conclusions from musical ‘data’. Scholarly discussions of musical exoticisms and ‘intercultural’ borrowings have typically focussed on sound-based, unwritten modes of apprehension (e.g., Debussy’s gamelan encounter in 1889, or Viennese representations of Turkish Janissary music). However, the systematic presentation of broad collections of musical snippets by the early twentieth century served not only scholarly enterprises but also composers, who saw, in print, a trove of raw materials and ingredients ripe for borrowing. The abstraction of these musical snippets from the sound-worlds of their sources, via textual mediation and taxonomical reconfiguration, means that the resulting compositions are sonically distant from the musical cultures to which they are indebted. The borrowings’ Otherness is marked not by sonic clichés but by traces of textual and philological practices.

To explore the textual mediation of musical exoticisms I focus on the striking example of how Olivier Messiaen drew upon Sanskrit philologist Joanny Grosset’s research on the thirteenth-century Saṅ gīta ratnākara of Śārṅgadeva. The mediation of textual practices is paramount at several stages: Śārṅgadeva encodes rhythmic structures into a compact, versified jargon, isolated from other musical parameters; Grosset adapts poetry into Western notation, implanting the rhythms into the heterotopian world of an encyclopedia entry; Messiaen selects and transforms rhythms, burying them into compositions beyond recognition. The textuality of Messiaen’s borrowings assumes even a social dimension, as Messiaen gleefully peppers scores with Sanskritesque terminology and appropriates the contagious prestige of a Classical language with mystical associations. Amanda Bayley (Bath Spa University) The role of notation in developing an intercultural performance practice This paper illustrates how both prescriptive and descriptive notation construct relations between performers from different musical traditions. The research presented here is less concerned with examining a composer’s intentions or composer-performer interactions, and more concerned with investigating the role of notation as an object of social interaction and cultural exchange between performers. The rigidity of notation on the one hand, is set against the fluidity of creativity and interactivity on the other. For musicians trained in Western classical music, when learning Turkish (or Arabic) makam music, notation plays a similar role to the lead sheet for jazz musicians. There the similarity ends, however, because in a Turkish context the emphasis is not on improvising around the notation but learning patterns, phrase shapes, nuances of articulation, dynamics, vibrato, bow strokes, and ornamentation according to an established tradition.

When considering a range of approaches to developing an intercultural performance practice, notation can fulfil many roles, some of which are discussed here:

• a starting point that triggers dialogue between players surrounding instrumental technique and musical expression

• a melodic skeleton from which layers of ornamentation are communicated through oral transmission • a transcription tool for learning music from an unfamiliar tradition • a way of translating, and fixing, a variety of musical parameters during workshops or rehearsals.

Ethnographic methods allow these differences in musical approach to be observed through a series of workshops and rehearsals with members of the Hezarfen Ensemble and players of the ney, kanun, kemençe, baglama and kaval, within the project ‘Beyond East and West: Developing and Documenting an Evolving Transcultural Musical Practice’, 2015-2020 (funded by the European Research Council). Data collected from audio and video recordings of 10 days of workshops in Istanbul in April and November 2016, and May and August 2017, enable creative and interactive processes to be analysed when musicians from different traditions are confronted with new sounds and new notation.

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Alon Schab (University of Haifa) Performers of early music - Self-fashioning through notation The Early Music Revival, especially in its early and somewhat naive stages, celebrated its claim for “authenticity” in various ways. The primary means by which ensembles tried to convince the audience that they perform authentically was their use of authentic instruments. Another means, which was less immediately audible and visible but was prominent nonetheless, was the notation they used: facsimile editions, self-produced transcriptions of sources, and critical editions prepared ad hoc for their recording projects. Implicitly or explicitly criticizing their colleagues in the mainstream Bach-to-Brahms tradition and their often careless choices of edition, early music ensembles frequently specified the sources from which they worked on the sleeves of their LPs, boasted their pioneering performances of “original versions” of works, and often bothered to make known their acquaintance with the sources.

The pioneers’ innovative, and sometimes provocative, insistence on using historical sources was adopted by their students’ generation. However, those younger performers now had to re-evaluate the reasoning behind the modus operandi they inherited from their teachers. As with the use of historical instruments, the use of historical sources was now in peril of changing from an unavoidable ideological measure taken despite practical inconveniences it brings about, to mere habit or to a fashionable ornament.

In my paper I will compare the different ways in which the changing context of the early music scene affects performers’ approach to the performance material they use from the 1960s to this day. I will analyse several case studies (interviews given by some of the pioneers, recent recordings of young artists, promotional videos) and will argue that performers today often fail to recognize the intricacy of the score and all too often treat the performance from historical sources as “mannerism,” more relevant to public relations than to the essence of music making.

Session 6B: Transcription and representation

Grace Kim (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Sonata of Muybridge's horse galloping This paper centers on a single letter printed in a Victorian sports periodical in 1897. In a short yet strikingly ambitious letter, English stained glass designer Henry Holiday responded to the photographic feats of Eadweard Muybridge, an important figure in the history of cinema and who is famous for his instantaneous photographs of the running horse. Writing against the way Muybridge’s images had thus far appealed to the public’s visual aesthetic, Holiday in his letter transformed Muybridge’s photographs of a running horse into musical notation and asked his audience to take seriously the images’ significance for an auditory—even musical—understanding of the horse’s locomotion. By assigning, for instance, pitches to the horse’s feet, Holiday arrived at what he called a “theme that satisfies the ear.” Indeed, in so doing, Holiday even claimed to have found a way to validate composer Ludwig van Beethoven’s musical representation of the sound of a galloping horse. Holiday’s letter therefore exemplifies the openness of interpretations that took place in the Victorian “cultural marketplace” (Fyfe and Lightman 2007). It certainly speaks to the ways in which the camera encouraged people in the nineteenth century to see the truth of the natural world anew. In bringing together his interests in science, music, and the visual arts, Holiday offered a synesthetic framework by which Muybridge’s technology and scientific “facts” could be verified. Furthermore, Holiday suggested a way to extend Muybridge’s experiments to encompass aural ways of knowing. This paper aims to illustrate the irresistibility of interpreting knowledge across media, disciplines, and the senses—without forgetting the historical and cultural situatedness of the interpreter.

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Melle Kromhout (University of Cambridge) ‘Nature has completely denied me a musical ear’: Are musical notes sine waves, and why (not)? Although Western music notation predates their conceptualization by at least 800 years, it can be argued that written notes, representing individual pitches, are symbolic representations of sine waves. This paper explores this proposition by looking at the nineteenth century development of the concept of the sine wave, focusing on Georg Ohm’s groundbreaking article On the Definition of Tone from 1843, which first applied the mathematical principles of Fourier Analysis to the study of sound.

Much of the scientific trajectory leading up to Ohm’s breakthrough sees a gradual disappearance of standard musical notation. When pitches are reinterpreted as frequencies, music itself becomes less and less important. In his second article on the definition of tone (1844), Ohm even explicitly admits that “nature has completely denied me a musical ear.” Although music would take center stage again in Helmholtz’s acoustic work of the 1850s and 60s, I argue that Ohm’s self-confessed ‘unmusicality’ is a key factor in understanding the impact of this new theory of sound.

As a decisive development in the transitions from a culture of symbolic transcription to a culture of technological inscription, mathematical Fourier analysis processes the physicality of sound beyond the grid of traditional intervals or harmonies. Ohm’s work in acoustics can therefore be interpreted as the introduction of what media theoretician Bernhard Siegert calls a ‘cultural technique’ that processes the distinction between the domain of music and the field of acoustics, between what is called music and what is called sound, between musical harmonies and physical frequency spectra and, indeed, between musical notes and mathematical sine waves. Patrick Valiquet (University of Edinburgh) Scoring the listener: Discipline and representation in acousmatic music Acousmatic music is characterized in theory as a practice mediated only by the ear. Constructing their work according to a system of applied phenomenological reflection that 'brackets' the presence of sounding bodies and spaces, acousmatic composers and theorists claim to privilege a concrete engagement with the structure of audition itself. Early accounts framed this phonocentrism as a necessary response to the radical plurality of musical aesthetics made available by global mass mediation. The fact that European traditions could no longer wield authority over this rapid proliferation of musical material led acousmatic theorists to prescribe a McLuhanesque return to orality.

Yet notation-like visual representations of acousmatic music abound, especially in the form of 'listening scores' for use in analysis and pedagogy. Combining influences from common practice notation as well as technical diagrams, ethnographic transcriptions, and the visual arts, these scores provide a kind of cross modal prosthesis for listeners unfamiliar with the vagaries of acousmatic convention. Replacing indications of instrumentation and expression with synthaesthetic arrangements of colour, shape or texture, they encourage a feeling of unmediated contact with the sound of a composition as it unfolds from its inscription on tape or disc.

This paper asks what listening scores can tell us about the ethical and epistemological frameworks embedded in acousmatic practice. Excavating archival material from pedagogical workshops in 1970s Quebec and France, it shows how acousmatic composers, deeply involved in contemporary efforts to reform education around new ideals of democratic citizenship and media literacy, worked to transform musical listening from a form of passive reception to an active communicative engagement. More than a simple representation of an otherwise unmediated act, the listening score helped train listeners to exercise a sense of proprietorship over their musical experiences that could only make sense in a soundscape saturated by media commodities.

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Day 3: Sunday 22 April

Session 7A: Music as performance

Petter Frost Fadnes (University of Stavanger) Alexander von Schlippenbach and the question of Total Improvisation Alexander von Schlippenbach has since the mid sixties been a hugely influential figure on the European experimental jazz scene – as a piano player, improviser, bandleader and composer. A pioneer of what Jost (1974) terms European Free Jazz, Schlippenbach is part of a scene which artistic foundation consists of a complex pool of post-war European aesthetics.

This research is based on an in-depth interview with Schlippenbach; scrutinizing both his influences and his influencing, and more specifically angled as a case study on the improvisation/composition binary in a European context. Schlippenbach’s aesthetic blend of the jazz canon, contemporary composition, and collective improvisation, intermixed with national idiosyncrasies and strong personalities, underlines a path towards the new aesthetics within post-war Europe and highlights much of the pioneering work behind our contemporary jazz scene as we know it today.

The core of Schlipppenbach’s music is found in his sophisticated development- and utilization of improvisational structure, mediated as leader of Globe Unity Orchestra by hybrid notation techniques and eclectic compositional thinking. In addition, GU uses individual personalities with a highly established sense of musical identity (e.g. recognised soloists), arguing the case for people as part of his composition/notation process.

Louis d'Heudieres (Bath Spa University) Colourful interactions: Composers, theatrical scores, and music as performance In his 2013 book Beyond The Score: Music As Performance, Nicholas Cook presents a compelling case for understanding Western Art Music as being primarily performative in nature, but nevertheless comprising an inalienable element of literature (the score).1 While many of the musicological discussions cited by Cook turn to Historically Informed Performance as a way of illustrating the importance performance should have in an understanding of music,2 in this paper I seek to add another perspective by discussing recent works whose compositional concerns have involved radically reimagining the role of scores and notation, namely by making the performers’ interaction with the score a theatrical consideration. The three case studies I will discuss to illustrate my argument are Peter Ablinger’s Wachstum und Massenmord (2010), Celeste Oram’s mirror #1 (2013), and Gavin Bryars’s 1, 2, 1-2-3-4 (1970).

Central to my argument is the idea of manipulating time as an essential feature of score interaction. The scores I discuss are time-based either inherently, by virtue of their medium—this is the case with video and audio scores—or through an artificially imposed process—paper scores given a limited amount of time to be learned, for example. As such, they are re-construed as theatrical agents, indicating that their composers are primarily interested in their contributing to meaning that arises through performance. This must be reconciled with the context composers inherit—namely, non-dramatic, concert hall musical performance, which has historically linked the perception of sound with the idea of abstract musical works. Bringing to bear the theatrical ramifications of ‘temporalised’ scores on performers’ sounds and gestures, I conclude by critically reflecting upon my examples, and showing how the provide new insights in addition to Cook’s discussions about the kind of meaning that arises in musical performance.

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Graeme Boone (Ohio State University) Visualizing improvisational composition: The case of Dark Star Close study of the recorded legacy of 'Dark Star,' iconic improvisatory vehicle of the Grateful Dead, has allowed for the construction of satisfying visual representations of the song, both in individual performances and across the full body of 219 that have been preserved, ranging from its modest origins in 1967 to its elaboration as the grandest vehicle for the Dead's legendary group improvisations. The diverse strategies and episodes in these performances, emerging and then evolving radically over time, have been captured in a diverse set of notated symbols and colors, whose arrangement, following the musical improvisations, illuminates an overall praxis but also complex narrative arc that guided the musicians in their polyvalent explorations across 27 years. The notations specify recurrent techniques for initiation, development, climax, and resolution, techniques that constitute in their own, hidden way the material identity of 'Dark Star'; and they illuminate what 'Dark Star' was as a musical locus, how it changed over time, how it stormed the limits of rock 'n' roll, and, most poignantly, how it ended up as a reflexive, nostalgic shell. As an empirical construction, the notations conjure their own poetics and, indeed, politics of expression; in that spirit, the paper culminates with a representation of the song, in its total longitudinal identity, as a mandalic/analytical holism, thus proposing a link between musical and cultural identity, analysis, and art.

James Saunders (Bath Spa University) Notating group behaviours This paper explores ways in which the social behaviour of groups can be used as a means to articulate musical structures and processes, embodying decision-making in live performance and exploring the way choices and actions by individual performers affect the behaviour of the whole group, and the resultant music. Recent work using recorded instructions (Nickel 2016), performance practice training (Sdraulig 2013) and cueing networks (Saunders 2017) suggest approaches to group behaviours that rely on different notation frameworks to construct relations between performers, including decision-making and heuristics (Gigerenzer et al 2002; Saunders 2015), process and constraint, and the mode of delivery of instructions. Such work uses group behaviours to suggest methods for harnessing specific motivations of players, bringing art and life closer together by ‘mapping the two onto each other by using people as a medium’ (Bishop 2012: 127), facilitating ‘the process of engaging with the world and oneself through play’ (Sicart 2014: 84). The paper examines how these types of notation, and the way they are presented to those realising a score, impact on behaviours that emerge in performance. Drawing on extant behavioural theory, including intergroup conflict (Forsyth 2013) and community forming (Brown 2001), it considers the core models that underpin the strategies that composers use to shape behaviours in their work and how notation can be used to frame and expose sociality.

Session 7B: Technologies

Harry Whalley (University for the Creative Arts) Projecting the pen: Real time composition using overhead projection Since 2014 I have performed ‘live composition’ using a traditional overhead-projector (OHP) and acetate paper. The effect is that music notation, graphic scores and other elements are drawn in real-time for performers to react too. It also has a particular ability to engage an audience with the process of composition and improvisation. The OHP also acts a conducting screen, magnifying the movements of the hand.

I have performed using this technique with ensembles of various sizes, from full orchestra to small chamber groups, with and without electronics. Over the course of the next year I shall be interrogating the theoretical boundaries of this technique with particular focus on the interface of improvisation and composition, the role of the score in the relationship between performers and composers and in the case of the OHP the audience also.

The physical constraint of time is arguably the defining factor that separates improvisation with composition but yet the act of musical improvisation and the processes of composition are part of a continuum. They can often seem paradoxically discrete and continuous at the same time. This paper will interrogate my own experience and approach within the frame work of music notation within a performance setting.

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Furthermore, this project forms part of a wider conversation in practice-led research. I am working with the Gildas String Quartet on codifying this practice and comparing my findings with researchers Dr Carla Rees (OCA), Dr Richard Worth (Liverpool) and Dr Papageorgiou (Edinburgh). Amy Brandon (Dalhousie University) Motor learning, perceptual patterns and guitar notation in augmented reality Guitar students (in popular, jazz and classical fields) will often use multiple types of notation to learn music. The persistent popularity of visuomotor transformations such as chord charts, scale patterns and tablature speaks to a core disconnect between the types of representation and notation used to teach and transmit guitar music, and the motor skills inherent in guitar performance. This core disconnect can be illustrated by the fact that neither traditional notation nor visuomotor transformations truly encapsulates the perceptual, sensory and motor information required to perform a piece of guitar music. Tablature can effectively reflect the perceptual fretboard patterns used by jazz guitarists to plan their improvisations (Norgaard, 2008), however, they offer little in the way of motor or kinaesthetic information, and little to no information about the notes or rhythms of the music itself. Classical guitar notation is quite the opposite in this regard – much less information about fretboard patterns (McFadden, 2010) and a great deal more motor instruction and musical information. This disconnect can also be seen in frequent difficulties undergraduate guitar students experience when they move into a university setting which prioritizes traditional notation over visuomotor transformations (Ward, 2011; Odegard, 2004). This paper explores the essential limitations of both traditional and visuomotor notation for the guitar from a cognitive and motor learning perspective, as well as exploring what a more integrated and complete notation might look like in the 3D space provided by augmented reality.

Ed Hughes, Chris Kiefer & Alice Eldridge (University of Sussex) The impact of networked musical notation technology on the experience of ensemble music making This paper reports on how a digital music notation app conceived as an intervention to help more beginners and young people access the experience of ensemble music-making speaks to broader questions of notation, performance and technology. Syncphonia is a new software app devised by researchers at the University of Sussex as part of an investigation into alleviating anxiety and enhancing enjoyment of less experienced music readers taking part in ensemble and orchestral performance. During a trial with school children aged 9-11, participants reported feeling a better 'sound' due to stress reduction and the ability to read longer and more complex pieces, leading to an enhanced sense of the structure and flow of the music. But further experimental workshops with adult community ensembles performing contemporary music, and a cross-over workshop featuring a rock band and a classical music ensemble, yielded new insights into the broader potential value of this intervention. For example, an electric guitarist, performing a line of music as part of an experimental cross-over ensemble, after many years of not using notation, had a transformative experience when technology support conferred confidence to embellish and improvise within a large-scale structure composition of classical notated music. Overall it will be argued that a potential contribution of this app and new libraries of flexibly notated music will be to enhance access to the experience of ensemble music for novice players, but with results that also imply future porous, flexible and creative mediations between the zones of composition, creation, interpretation and performance.

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Brian Miller (Yale University) Algorithmic agents, encoded ontologies, and digital corpora: On the objects of computational music theory As computational approaches to music analysis increase in prominence and complexity (and corpora of digitized scores become more widely available), a variety of questions of notation and representation arise. Given that at present much of this work is disciplinarily aligned with subfields like music cognition or music information retrieval that draw on scientific and/or technical methods, some of these questions are readily dealt with in those terms: how can error rates be reduced when encoding a corpus? What kinds of digital representations of music are computationally efficient? But while computational scholars are often quite careful in discussing the limitations of their methods, there has been little attempt to provide a critical view of the affordances and implications of such work and its materials from a broader theoretical perspective. What happens to music notation when it goes digital? Is the computer reading the “same” music we are?

This paper traces the beginnings of such a line of inquiry by arguing that key to understanding digital notations is an account of the semiotics of the algorithms that analyze them. Drawing on recent anthropological work on semiotics, agency, and computation, I ask: how do algorithms relate to their objects of study, and in so doing constitute those very objects? Furthermore, if the real goal of computational analysis is to improve humans’ understanding of music, how does the relation between traditional score and human interpreter mediate the relation between digital score and algorithm, and vice versa? I focus here on the application of machine learning techniques to the study of tonality and harmonic function, but also discuss the broader relevance of this approach for computational scholarship and for theorizations of musical style in general.

Roger Moseley (Cornell University) Notation and the networking of musical spacetime

It has become a truism to acknowledge that no musical score stands alone, material idiosyncrasies or claims to aesthetic autonomy notwithstanding. But through and beyond their cultural and socio-technological entanglements, how are scores connected across space and time, and how do they reflect and construct geographical and historical realities? This paper addresses these linked questions by proposing a genealogical basis for considering how scores both represent and instantiate networks of various kinds. Drawing on examples of machine- and human-readable notation from the 17th through the 21st centuries, I contend that scores do more than encode, prompt, and bear traces of spatiotemporal musical experience: they sustain the epistemological conditions under which such experience can be rendered legible and transmissible.

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Contributor biographies

Giulia Accornero, Harvard University Giulia Accornero is a PhD student in music theory at Harvard University. She is currently focusing on innovations in western musical notation and the meanings they convey, with a particular focus on the Middle Ages and New Music. Her writings have been published by ETS and Edizioni del Teatro alla Scala. In 2014 she founded Sound of Wander, a new music season in Milan, and continues to organize composition masterclasses in collaboration with them. Peter Asimov, University of Cambridge Peter Asimov is a PhD student at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge (Clare College), where he is also a Gates Scholar. He holds a Masters degree in musicology from the University of Oxford, and an undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Brown University. He has presented research in the UK and the US, and is an accomplished pianist and chamber musician, having performed on four continents. He was also étudiant-chercheur at the Conservatoire de Paris in 2016. Manuel Bärtsch, Bern University of the Arts HKB Manuel Bärtsch is a Swiss pianist and musicologist. Born in St.Gallen/CH, he studied at the Basel Music Academy with Jürg Wyttenbach (chamber music: Walter Levin and Hatto Beyerle, composition: Rudolf Kelterborn) where he graduated with the soloist diploma. Prices as chamber musician at International competitions in Stuttgart, Berlin and Graz, solo concerts with the Basler Symphonieorchester and the Orchestre National de Lyon, collaborations with contemporary composers and his research projects and publications about piano performance practises of the early 20th century show his widespread individualistic interests. He is a professor and a research lecturer at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB). His research projects turn around the recordings for reproducing pianos at the beginning of the twentieth century. Amanda Bayley, Bath Spa University Amanda Bayley is Professor of Music at Bath Spa University where she leads a research group on Intercultural Communication through Practice. Developing her research on composer-performer collaborations and rehearsal analysis, recent publications include ‘Cross-cultural Collaborations with the Kronos Quartet’ in Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music (Oxford University Press, 2017), and ‘Developing Dialogues in Intercultural Music-making’ in the Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research (2016). She is humanities editor for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies and Co-Investigator on two ERC-funded projects: www.amandabayley.co.uk Nicholas Bleisch, King's College, University of Cambridge Nicholas is currently in his fourth year of doctoral study at the University of Cambridge under the direction of Dr Sam Barrett. His thesis studies a single manuscript, trouvère chansonnier V, with an aim to re-evaluating the music notators and rehabilitating the source as a window into late thirteenth-century musical and notational practice. Nicholas has presented on notions of musical error at the first Franco-Italian congress on philology and musicology at Saint-Guilhem (Qui dit tradition dit faute? 2017) and will convene a one-day conference at King’s College Cambridge on musical dialogue in trouvère song on 5 May. Graeme Boone, Ohio State University Graeme M. Boone’s research publications center on 15th- and 20th-century music. In the former area, he has analyzed the paleography, style, and chronology of song repertories, proposed a new model for early French musical prosody, synthesized a new view of mensural time and rhythm, and explained the rise of white notation as a form of musical handwriting; he is currently writing a book on music and affect. In the latter area, he has co-edited the essay collection Understanding Rock (1997), written on jazz, blues, and gospel, and is continuing to analyze the musical language of the Grateful Dead.

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Amy Brandon, Dalhousie University Holding degrees in jazz guitar performance and composition, guitarist Amy Brandon is currently completing an interdisciplinary PhD in music cognition at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has performed in Canada, the USA, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK and festivals including ISIM, BeAST FeAST and NYCEMF. Awards include the National Sawdust Hildegard Initiative (2018 Honourable Mention), nominations for Music Nova Scotia and ECMA awards for her jazz-electroacoustic album 'Scavenger', and the 2017 Roberta Stephen Award. She has presented her academic work at Berklee College of Music and conferences in Australia, USA, Switzerland, Hungary and the UK. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Utrecht University Dr. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is full professor of Literature and Comparative Media at the University of Utrecht and Kiene's research focuses on: literature and (new) media; creativity and creative thinking in education; music; aesthetic theory; intermediality in the modern and post-modern age. She is the author of Musically Sublime (New York: Fordham UP, 2009), and (with Ann Rigney) Het leven van teksten. Een Inleiding in de literatuurwetenschap (Amsterdam UP, 2006, 2008). She is editor of Book Presence in a Digital Age (Bloomsbury 2018), Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace (Fordham/Oxford UP 2012), and of the special issue on Literature and the Material Turn for Comparative Literature (2018). Marcel Cobussen, Leiden University Marcel Cobussen is Full Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy at Leiden University (NL) and the Orpheus Institute in Ghent (B). He studied jazz piano at the Conservatory of Rotterdam and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University, Rotterdam (NL). Cobussen is author/editor of several books, among them The Field of Musical Improvisation (LUP 2017), The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art (Routledge 2016, co-editors Barry Truax and Vincent Meelberg), Music and Ethics (Ashgate 2012/Routledge 2017, co-author Nanette Nielsen), and Thresholds. Rethinking Spirituality Through Music (Ashgate 2008). He is editor-in-chief of the open access online Journal of Sonic Studies (www.sonicstudies.org). Louis d'Heudieres, Bath Spa University Louis d'Heudieres is a composer based in London. His works have been performed throughout the UK, Europe and North America at many festivals and concert series, and have been broadcast several times on BBC Radio 3, Resonance 104.4 FM, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and Danish national radio DR P2. Some of the themes his work explores are human minds and bodies as sonic/cognitive filters, vulnerability and failure in concert settings, and personal relationships with pieces of music. Since around 2015 he has been writing almost exclusively using sound as a medium for notation. Louis is currently studying for a PhD in composition at Bath Spa University with James Saunders as main supervisor and Matthew Shlomowitz as external supervisor. He has lectured on the undergraduate music courses at the Royal College of Music, King's College London, and Bath Spa University. www.louisdheudieres.com Laura Dolp, Montclair State University Laura Dolp’s interdisciplinary research explores the historical agency of music as a site of human transformation, including music and spirituality, the interrelation of music and social spaces, mapping and musical practices, and the poetics of the natural world. She is editor of Arvo Pärt’s White Light: Media, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-author for The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (2012) and Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (Oxford University Press, 2016). Dr. Dolp is Associate Professor of Musicology and Coordinator of General Education Studies at the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University (USA), where she teaches undergraduate history and graduate special topics. She holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia University. For more information, see LauraDolp.com.

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Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Harvard University Elaine Fitz Gibbon is a current PhD candidate in historical musicology at Harvard University. She received her MA in German Studies from Princeton University in 2017 and her BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Musicology and German Studies in 2013. Her interests are focused on opera, music theater and vocal music of the European avant-garde from 1945 to today. Petter Frost Fadnes, University of Stavanger Dr Petter Frost Fadnes is a Norwegian saxophone player, lecturer and researcher based at the University of Stavanger. With a PhD in performance from University of Leeds, Frost Fadnes was for many years part of the highly creative Leeds-music scene, and is a founding member of Leeds Improvised Music Association (LIMA). Frost Fadnes has published on a wide range of performance related topics, such as jazz collectives, cultural factories, film scoring, jazz for young people and improvisational pedagogy. He is Associate Professor at The Faculty of Music and Dance, and former principal investigator for the HERA-funded research project Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities. Eliane Fankhauser Eliane Fankhauser studied recorder at the Zuercher Hochschule der Kuenste where she obtained her MA in music performance (2009). She thereafter studied musicology at the University of Basel (BA 2011) and at the University of Utrecht (Research MA 2013). In 2013, Fankhauser started her PhD on the Utrecht fragments and the musical environment in the northern Low Countries around 1400 at Utrecht University. She will defend her PhD thesis in May 2018. Digital tools such as Adobe Photoshop and CMME (Computerized Mensural Music Editing) help her examining the fragments and editing their contents in a most thorough and efficient way. Together with The Hague-based Ensemble Diskantores Fankhauser gives recital-lectures in which her research and the music settings are presented to the public. Today she works at the DANS institute (Data Archiving Networked Services) in The Hague as a project leader. Sarah Fuchs Sampson, Syracuse University Sarah Fuchs Sampson is an Assistant Professor of Music History and Cultures at Syracuse University. Grounded in archival research, her scholarship on the musical culture of the long nineteenth century is broadly interdisciplinary, incorporating perspectives from cultural history as well as film and media studies. Her current book project focuses on how audiences, voice teachers, and opera singers used technology to engage with French operatic culture around the turn of the nineteenth century; other ongoing work includes a study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century embellished piano-vocal scores published in Great Britain and France. Sean Gower, University of Cincinatti Sean Gower is a graduate student in musicology at the College-Conservatory of Music at University of Cincinnati, United States. His current work concerns music and sociology, French Romanticism, and film music of the 1960s. Sean is an editorial assistant for the Journal of the American Liszt Society, and is also active as a piano performer. Chieh-Ting Hsieh, Freie Universität Berlin Hsieh Chieh-ting finished his master’s degree in musicology at National Taiwan University. He is now working on his doctoral research in dance studies at Freie University Berlin. His recent research interests include the dynamics of music and dance; the body’s sense of dynamics and rhythm; and music and dance notation as culture technique, particularly with regard to the Chinese traditions of arts from the phenomenological and transcultural perspective.

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Ed Hughes, University of Sussex Ed Hughes is a composer and Professor of Composition at Sussex University (UK). Ed conceived and led an interdisciplinary project on networking technologies and the experience of ensemble performance. He also works on music and silent film, producing several live cinema scores in collaboration with leading contemporary visual artists and film makers, most recently for the Brighton Festival. His work has been recorded on three discs for Metier Records and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 & 4. He is artistic director of the New Music Players, and the Orchestra of Sound and Light. http://edhughes.org.uk Joseph S. Kaminski, Wagner College, Staten Island, New York Joseph S. Kaminski received his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Kent State University, his MA from Hunter College, a BA in Anthropology from the College of Staten Island, and an MM in Trumpet Performance from Manhattan School of Music. His most notable work has been on the music of the Asante of Ghana, their surrogate speech system as part of their oral tradition, and their use of musical sound within their religion. As a native New Yorker, he has taken initiatives in urban ethnomusicology as expressions of transnationalism, and has been conducting research into Chinese musical practices in New York’s Chinatown. Chae-Lin Kim, Berlin University of the Arts Chae-Lin Kim, born in 1987 in South Korea, studied Violoncello with Prof. Michael Sanderling at Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. After gaining an Artist Diploma she received her Master of Arts in Musicology from Freie Universität Berlin. Kim is currently a Ph.D. candidate at University of the Arts Berlin. Her dissertation is on the subject ›Hearingness of Contemporary Music. Deaf body in music(theatric)al context‹. Referring to this topic Kim recently hold a lecture series at University of the Arts Berlin and was also invited to speak at various conferences (in Potsdam, Hanover, Munich, Umeå). Grace Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Grace Kim is a PhD candidate in MIT’s Program in History | Anthropology | Science, Technology, and Society. She studies the latest technologies for art and heritage restoration, asking how scientists today contribute to concepts of authenticity and materiality. Drawing from science and technology studies as well as the anthropology of art and heritage, she investigates what happens to art and heritage as scientists use digital projection technology, nanotechnology, and biotechnology to help conservators treat deteriorated artifacts. Her field sites include the U.S. and Italy. Grace received her AB in History and Science at Harvard and MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. Melle Kromhout, University of Cambridge Working on the intersection of musicology, sound studies and media studies, Melle Kromhout is interested in the conceptual relations between music, sound and media from the nineteenth century to the present day. At the University of Cambridge, he currently works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the project Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century, studying the impact of the conceptualization of Fourier analysis and sine waves on sonic and musical cultures. His dissertation at the University of Amsterdam (2017) developed a media archaeological revaluation of the role of noise and distortion in recorded sound and music. More information: www.mellekromhout.nl. Mathias Maschat Mathias Maschat works as a musicologist, concert organizer, musician and piano teacher in Berlin. He studied cultural studies and aesthetic praxis with a major in music in Hildesheim. His PhD-Project is on the Aesthetics of Improvisation in the Context of the Musical Avantgarde, with which he was a member of the graduate program Erinnerung – Wahrnehmung – Bedeutung. Musikwissenschaft als Geisteswissenschaft at the University of Osnabrück. He worked as a media representative at ohrenstrand.net and was a scientific intern at the music department of the ministry for science and culture of Lower Saxony. He works at exploratorium berlin and co-curates the series biegungen im ausland.

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Kate Maxwell, University of Tromsø Kate Maxwell is associate professor of music history at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her research centres on multimodality, medieval music, and popular music, with particular foci on musical notation and gender. Her recent publications include work on the role of musical notation in Beck, the Livre de Fauvel, 'Sumer is icumen in', and Guillaume de Machaut. As well as Tromsø she has worked in Kristiansand, Paris, and Glasgow, and is an active composer and performer. Erin McHugh, Royal College of Music Erin McHugh is a PhD student at the Royal College of Music, supported by a Douglas Hay Award and a Lucy Ann-Jones Award. She has been a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the college since 2016. An opera singer herself, Erin's research interests span the fields of opera, aesthetics, and gender studies. Erin's PhD thesis, 'The Vocality of the Dramatic Soprano Voice' explores the connections between early twentieth century gender politics and the vocal identities of the female characters in the early operas of Richard Strauss. She has presented papers at the 2015 and 2017 RMA student conferences as well as the 2014 'Music on Stage' conference at Rose Bruford College. In addition to her interest in musicology, Erin is passionate about museums and public engagement in the arts. She has worked at the RCM Museum of Music since 2013, leading guided tours and curating digital exhibitions. Scott Mc Laughlin, University of Leeds Scott Mc Laughlin is a composer and improviser based in Huddersfield, UK. Born in Ireland (Co. Clare) in 1975. He studied BMus (Uni of Ulster), MA/PhD Uni of Huddersfield (PA Tremblay, C Fox, J Saunders, B Harrison). He lectures in composition and music technology at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on contingency and indeterminacy in the physical materiality of sound and performance, combining approaches from spectral music and experimental music with dynamical systems theory to explore material agency and recursive feedback systems in constraint-based open-form composition. Brian Miller, Yale University Brian Miller is a PhD candidate in music theory at Yale University, having previously completed undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Kansas in computer engineering and music theory, respectively. His dissertation critiques and expands upon Leonard Meyer’s theory of musical style, reading it alongside approaches to style from art history and anthropology and providing a critical account of its legacy, particularly in the context of information-theoretic and algorithmic approaches to music, from analysis to composition to performance. His broader interests include twentieth-century music, media theory, critical theory, and sound studies. Lilli Mittner, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway Lilli Mittner studied musicology, and media and communication at the University of Göttingen and the University of Oslo. In 2014, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Music, Drama and Media in Hanover with a dissertation on women composers in Norway, professionalism in music and gender sensitive historiography. She is currently project coordinator for the state-funded project “Gender Balance in Art Education” at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and holds a postdoc position in feminist art intervention at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, UiT.

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Roger Moseley, Cornell University Roger Moseley’s recent research focuses on intersections between keyboard music, digital games, and the diverse ways in which they can be played. In 2017, his first book, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo, received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award, which recognizes “a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar beyond the early stages of his or her career.” Moseley has published essays on topics including the music of Brahms (on which he wrote his PhD dissertation), Mozart, eighteenth-century keyboard improvisation, Guitar Hero, and media archaeology. He is also active as a collaborative pianist on modern and historical instruments. Moseley is currently working on his second book, Romantic Artifacts: The Technological Disclosure of Nineteenth-Century Music, which subjects the songs of Schubert, the piano music of Chopin, the chamber music of Fauré, and the orchestral music of Brahms to media-theoretical and music-analytical scrutiny. You Nakai, New York University You Nakai conducts research on experimental/electronic music, post-dance, history of tablatures, the occult mechanism of influence and other curiosities, and reports his findings in the form of academic papers. He has spent considerable time studying the music of David Tudor, for which he obtained a PhD from New York University and is now writing a book called “Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor’s Music” under contract with Oxford University Press. You also fabricates music(ians), dance(rs), picture books, ghost houses and other forms of work as part of No Collective (http://nocollective.com) and organizes the experimental publishing project Already Not Yet (http://alreadynotyet.org) in Brooklyn, NY. Jacob Olley, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Jacob Olley is a research associate on the long-term DFG project "Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Near Eastern Music Manuscripts", based at the University of Muenster. He completed his PhD, which deals with the cultural history of music notation in late Ottoman Istanbul, at King's College London in 2017. His research interests include the edition and analysis of Armeno-Turkish music manuscripts, the cultural history of Ottoman music in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the intersection between music and global history. Emily Payne, University of Leeds Emily Payne a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC-funded project, ‘John Cage and the Concert for Piano and Orchestra’, and a Teaching Fellow in Music Psychology, based at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include musical performance studies (particularly of 20th-century musics), creativity, and collaboration. Her work has been published in Contemporary Music Review, cultural geographies, Musicae Scientiae, and Music & Letters. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Time in Music, under contract with Oxford University Press. Emily also works as an Academic Studies Tutor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Lara Pearson, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics Lara Pearson is an ethnomusicologist with a regional specialization in South India. Her areas of research include music and gesture, South Indian raga performance, music transmission, aesthetics, and embodied music cognition. She completed her doctorate on gesture in Karnatak music at the University of Durham in 2016, after which she worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She is currently a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. Matthew Peattie, University of Cincinatti Matthew Peattie is an Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music. He holds degrees in musicology from l’Université de Montréal and Harvard University. His publications include “Transcribing the Beneventan Chant” (Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2010), “Old Beneventan Melodies in a Breviary at Naples” (Journal of Musicology, 2012), as well as essays in Musica e liturgia a Montecassino nel Medioevo (2012) and in City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music (2013). An edition of the Music of the Beneventan Rite, co-authored with Thomas F. Kelly, appears in the series Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi (Bärenreiter, 2016).

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Sanna Raninen, Uppsala University Sanna Raninen is a researcher of early music, with a special interest in the material and visual culture of music during the Renaissance. Sanna is currently a Research Fellow at the Uppsala University, conducting a project funded by the Kone Foundation on the material culture of music books in post-Reformation Sweden. Previously she was a Research Associate for the Leverhulme-funded project Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy at the University of Sheffield, and she completed her PhD at the University of Manchester as part of an AHRC-funded project Production and Reading of Music Sources 1480–1530, focussing on the production methods and use of printed sources of polyphony during the early sixteenth century. Matthew Sergeant, Bath Spa University Matthew Sergeant (b.1984) is a composer whose music is currently exploring ideas surrounding identity and materiality, space and place. His work is frequently performed internationally, both throughout the Europe, North, Central and South America, Asia, and Australasia. Matthew’s music has been commissioned and/or performed by internationally acclaimed ensembles including, the London Symphony Orchestra (UK), the BBC Concert Orchestra (UK), the BBC Singers (UK), CEPROMusic (Mexico), The House of Bedlam (UK), BCMG (UK), Divertimento Ensemble (Italy), ELISION Ensemble (Australia), ensemble 10/10 (UK), ensemble plus-minus (UK), EXAUDI (UK) and the Nieuw Ensemble (Netherlands) as well numerous ongoing creative partnerships with emerging and established soloists. Matthew’s work has featured at major international festivals, including the BMIC Cutting Edge Series (London, UK), Festival Musica (France), hcmf// (UK) Sirga Festival (Spain) and Sydney International Festival (Australia). Matthew is currently senior lecturer in composition at Bath Spa University. James Saunders, Bath Spa University James Saunders is a composer with an interest in group behaviours and decision making. He performs in the duo Parkinson Saunders and runs the Open Scores Lab at Bath Spa University. James is currently working on new pieces for Nadar Ensemble (Transit), and Arditti Quartet and Ensemble Modern (Wien Modern). See www.james-saunders.com for more information. Alon Schab, University of Haifa Alon Schab is a musicologist, a composer and an early music performer. A graduate of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Alon wrote his doctoral dissertation in Trinity College Dublin on the subject of “Compositional Technique in Purcell’s Early Instrumental Works”. Since 2012 he is a faculty member in the Department of Music in the University of Haifa. In 2016 he became a committee member of the Purcell Society. He is currently the secretary of the Israeli Musicological Society. His book The Sonatas of Henry Purcell: Rhetoric and Reversal (University of Rochester Press) is due to appear next month. Floris Schuiling, Utrecht University Floris Schuiling specializes in the role of material culture and technology in musical creativity. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge for his work on Amsterdam-based improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool. He is currently pursuing a postdoctoral project on Notation Cultures at Utrecht University, funded by a Veni grant from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research. This project places music notation at the intersection of material culture and creative practice in different musical practices. His book Beyond Jazz: Notation and Improvisation in the Instant Composers Pool is forthcoming with Routledge. Tim Shephard, University of Sheffield Tim Shephard is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Sheffield, and also holds a status-only appointment as Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. A specialist in the music and art of Renaissance Italy, on which he has published numerous books and articles, he is also a co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (2014). From 2014-17 he led the project 'Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy', funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

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Rachel Stroud, University of Cambridge Rachel Stroud is a baroque violinist, and a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College, Cambridge University. After graduating with a first-class degree in Music from Cambridge in 2010, she toured for a year with the European Union Baroque Orchestra before studying Historical Performance at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. She works professionally as a violinist and has performed all over the world with orchestras such as OAE, Brecon Baroque, and Les Passions de l’Ame. Research interests include the roles of sociality, agency and objects in performance (particularly orchestral performance without a conductor), and she is currently investigating the relationships between notation and performance in Beethoven’s late string quartets. Annini Tsioutis, Université Paris Sorbonne Annini Tsiouti studied piano and chamber music at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, and at the Conservatoire Claude Debussy. She also read Musicology at the Sorbonne University, where she specialized in 20th century music. Annini is currently completing her doctoral thesis on the 32 Piano Pieces by the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas. A fervent supporter of the music of our time, Annini has collaborated with a number of composers of different and often contrasting styles and schools, and has given many first performances of their works around Europe. Patrick Valiquet, University of Edinburgh Patrick Valiquet is a Canadian writer and researcher interested in the historical construction of listening as an object of science and education policy. Patrick completed his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford in 2014, and also holds a Master's degree from the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, and a Bachelor's degree in Performance from McGill University. Prior to commencing a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh in 2017, he held fellowships from the Institute of Musical Research, University of London, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture. Walter van de Leur, University of Amsterdam / Conservatory of Amsterdam Walter van de Leur is professor of Jazz and Improvised Music at the University of Amsterdam, on behalf of the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He is the author of the award-winning Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Oxford UP, 2002), and the founding editor of the five-volume Oxford History of Jazz in Europe (2019-2023). His monograph Jazz and Death: Rituals and Representations is expected in 2020 (Routledge). Van de Leur has led the Dutch work packages for two European-funded research projects: Rhythm Changes (Jazz and National Identity), and CHIME (Cultural Heritage and Improvised Music in European Festivals). Frieda van der Heijden, Royal Holloway, University of London Frieda van der Heijden submitted her PhD thesis last December and will have her viva this Tuesday (24th April). She is fascinated with medieval book production, wishes to learn more about how such manuscripts were used, likes things that are incorrect or incomplete, and loves a bit of mystery. She is also interested in digital humanities, the circulation and transmission of texts and medieval (secular) song. In her PhD project, which focuses on the unfinished early fourteenth-century manuscript F-Pn fr. 12786, she combined these and other interests. Frieda is now looking for a new challenge. Giovanni Varelli, University of Oxford Giovanni Varelli is Prize Fellow in Music at Magdalen College, Oxford. He specialises on Music and music-writing in the early Middle Ages, the politics and geographies of chant transmission, and early liturgical manuscripts. In his current project, Giovanni explores the cognitive processes in the development of music scripts in the Italic peninsula, as well as the influence of the contemporary political and ecclesiastical context on music book production.

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Harry Whalley, University for the Creative Arts Working between Edinburgh, Belfast and London, Harry Whalley is an award winning composer of contemporary classical, film and electroacoustic music. His works have been performed around the world and on BBC Radio 3. In 2016 Harry was appointed the first 'Composer in Residence' for St. Vincent's Chapel, Edinburgh where his music is featured regularly. More recently his score for the film ‘Bonington’ opened the Banff Mountain film festival. He completed his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and is currently course leader in Music Composition and Technology at the University for the Creative Arts (UK). Christopher Williams Christopher Williams (1981, San Diego) is a wayfarer on the body-mind continuum. His medium is music. PhD, Leiden Univesity; BA, University of California, San Diego. As a composer and contrabassist, Williams's work runs the gamut from chamber music, improvisation, and radio art to collaborations with dancers, sound artists, and visual artists. Williams’ artistic research on improvisation, notation, and his body-mind continuum takes the form of both conventional academic publications and practice-based multimedia projects. He also curates the Berlin concert series KONTRAKLANG and works with immersive sound experience makers Charles Morrow Productions. www.christopherisnow.com www.tactilepaths.net www.kontraklang.de Beth Williamson, University of Bristol Beth Williamson studied at Merton College, Oxford, where she was trained as historian, specialising in late medieval and renaissance cultural history. She then completed an MA and a PhD in Art History at the Courtauld Institute in London. She has taught at the University of Bristol since 1998, where she is now a Reader in History of Art. Her research concerns devotional imagery and practices of religious devotion. Her particular current interests range across questions of materiality and relics, as well as sensory dimensions of religious ritual and behaviour, and relationships between the visual and the aural in devotional practice. Naomi Woo, Clare College, Cambridge Naomi Woo is a pianist, conductor, and researcher, with a particular interest in contemporary music. Performance highlights in 2017-2018 include conducting Holst’s chamber opera Savitri, performing Carnival of the Animals alongside pianist Tom Poster, and assisting conductors Sir Mark Elder and Jac Van Steen with the Cambridge University Orchestra. Currently a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD candidate in musicology at Clare College, Naomi also holds a BA in mathematics & philosophy from Yale University, and degrees in piano performance from the Yale School of Music and Université de Montréal. www.naomiwoo.com

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Practical information Contact numbers Floris Schuiling: +31 6 29 62 13 29 Emily Payne: +44 7816 401211 Eliane Fankhauser: +31 6 33 08 85 21

Conference venue The conference will be held in Utrecht University’s University Hall, located in the centre of Utrecht next to the landmark Dom Cathedral and Tower. The address is: University Hall Domplein 29 3512 JE Utrecht

Travel By rail From Schiphol airport, trains to Utrecht take about 30 minutes and depart every 15 minutes. The train station is situated directly below the airport. By bus (from Utrecht Central Station) From Utrecht Central Station take bus 2, exit at Domplein. Travelling by public transport (university guidelines). By foot (10-minute walk from Utrecht Central Station) Follow directions to the ‘Museumkwartier’ (Museum Quarter). In the ‘Hoog Catharijne’ shopping mall, keep to the right, take the ‘Godebaldkwartier’ exit, and go left towards the Dom Tower. After passing right under the Dom Tower, cross over towards the right. The entrance to the University Hall is right in front of you. By car: parking The nearest car park is located at the Springweg, a ten-minute walk from the University Hall. On the motorway follow directions towards the city centre (Centrum), then look for signs to ‘P Springweg’. After parking your car exit the car park at the ‘Oudegracht’ side and walk through the ‘Strosteeg’ towards the ‘Oudegracht’. Cross the bridge and turn left. At the ‘Wed’ turn right, then cross the ‘Lange Nieuwstraat’. The entrance to the University Hall is right in front of you.

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Maps

City centre map

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Building maps

University Hall, Ground Floor

University Hall, First Floor

Main Entrance