At the Borders of Notation

Recent engagements with graphic notation by Indigenous experimentalists from across media bring into relief the settler-colonial logics of mid-twentieth century breaks with staff notation. In their 2017 exhibition _Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts_ (currently on tour), curators Dylan Robinson and Candice Hopkins asked Indigenous artists to frame their contributions to a gallery environment as "scores": that is, as prompts to bodily and sonic performance. These material scores include beadwork, Indigenous belongings long held in settler archives, regalia and clothing, or videos of the texture and scars on drum skins. Framing the materials as scores and placing them within a gallery setting raises questions about Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies of performance, relationality, permanence, and the work.

Working from my settler listening and writing positionality, I outline how the scores were read as prompts for performance before devoting substantial attention to the orthography of graphic scores by the Navajo artist and composer Raven Chacon. Both mid-century norms of graphic notation-as explored in critical work on Morton Feldman (Boutwell 2012, Cline 2016), Earle Brown (Alden 2007, Gresser 2007), Udo Kasemets (Strachan 2017), and in contemporaneous writing by Cage (1969), Cardew (1961), and others-and contemporary decolonial critiques of settler aesthetics would suggest skepticism towards the inclusion in graphic scores of the symbols and syntax of Western art music notation. However, Chacon's scores place these symbols front and center, littered about among crucifixes as the refuse of colonial culture. My reading draws extensively upon Indigenous studies and decolonial scholarship (Robinson 2020, Coulthard 2014, Mignolo 2011, Lyons 2010) to reflect on how Chacon's graphic scores enact a network of communicative assumptions entirely different from those of graphic scores by mid-century modernists. In those works, the limitations of staff notation became metonymic of the limitations placed on authorship, but the freedoms achieved by composers through their liberation from notational norms was solely their own. Despite ensuring the same basic causality as the Euro-American ideal of the score-in which a permanent trace is "read" as a direction or prompt to action-the _Soundings_ scores, including Chacon's, challenge the terrain of this liberation by placing long-term relationships at their core.

"I have always been troubled by the degraded role of sensuous immediacy in the relative values ascribed to music," wrote the composer, artist, and instrument inventor Lucia Dlugoszewski in 1973. Throughout the fifty years of her career, Dlugoszewski argued for an extreme attention to sonority through radical reinventions of musical form and innovative ways to notate them. Her approach to music as three-dimensional material and multimodal experience worked in tandem with the choreographer Erick Hawkins, her longtime partner and primary artistic collaborator, and reflected a dialogue with fellow composers and visual artists working in New York at the mid-century, including Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler. Dlugoszewski described the ideal of listening as a "flash," an experience of instant sensation and knowing that she likened to a kind of aesthetic epiphany. She located the greatest possibility for this experience in the employment of everyday objects and acoustic inventions as instrumentation. A retention of the rawness and tactility of sound after its organization into musical structure remained at the core of the composer's balance of material and form – what she called sonic Eros and Logos.


Due in part to professional complications at the end of her life and her death without a will in 2000, Dlugoszewski's work has lain rather dormant for the last twenty years – though it is now experiencing a revival in scholarship and performance. This paper will draw on the author's development of Dlugoszewski's papers and scores held at the Library of Congress (2016-ongoing) to discuss the composer's construction of musical form and innovations in graphic notation, which combine drawing, choreographic description, maps, and prose instruction. In particular, the author will examine Dlugoszewski's score for _Song for the Poetry of Everyday Sounds_ (1952), a pioneering example of graphic notation for instruments from the quotidian space; _Here and Now with Watchers_ (1958), a piece for one of Dlugoszewski's invented instruments, the "timbre piano"; and _Angels of the Inmost Heaven_ (1971), a monumental score for orchestra that combines traditional musical notation with sculptural sound maps.

There is no single genre more characteristic of the seventeenth-century French harpsichord school than the so-called "unmeasured prelude," with its unique and enigmatic white-note notation. Most studies of the genre focus on its apparent relationship to improvisation, attempting to situate it within the broader field of lute and harpsichord preluding. Davitt Moroney, Paul Prévost, and subsequent writers have established connections between lute preludes of the early seventeenth century, the quasi-improvisatory Italian toccata, and the French unmeasured preludes of Louis Couperin and others. That line of interpretation emphasizes the flexibility of rhythm suggested by certain visual aspects of the preludes' notation, while making assumptions about the function of – or completely ignoring – certain signs, which in some performances results in a nebulous, sometimes amorphous performance. Moreover, modern editions that claim to transcribe the preludes faithfully in fact introduce an extra degree of separation between the repertory and modern performers, fundamentally altering the relationship of notes and symbols on the page. In addition, scholars often apply principles for interpreting Italian toccatas to the unmeasured prelude, based on the influence of Johann Jacob Froberger in seventeenth-century France. Do we truly understand the construction of these pieces?


I argue that a new, systematic approach to the interpretation of unmeasured preludes is necessary. Rooted in French harpsichord technique, the native French approach to _basse continue_, and a structured comparison of French harpsichord preludes in white-note (unmeasured) and standard (measured) notation, my interpretive approach yields a strikingly different realization of these preludes which is more in keeping with our current understanding of seventeenth-century French musical culture. My conclusions suggest that unmeasured preludes preserve a more definite harmonic and rhythmic (pseudo-metrical) structure than previously supposed, expressed through ornamented chords and other gestures idiomatic to the seventeenth-century French harpsichordist. A comparison of the notational systems employed by a range of composers – Louis Couperin, Jean-Henry D'Anglebert, Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, Nicolas Lebegue, and Gaspard Le Roux, among others – and a contrast to the measured preludes by François Couperin reveals previously unrealized notational functions and underlying structures in the unmeasured prelude repertory.

In his forty years as a Jesuit missionary in China, Joseph-Marie Amiot (1718–93) devoted much of his time to intellectual activities. Between 1751 and 1781 he completed four large manuscripts in French on Chinese music, in two of which he described the Chinese system of music notation known as gongchepu, which employs Chinese characters for pitches and special ideograms for rhythm. Through an examination of these two manuscripts, my paper demonstrates Amiot's novel system, combining gongchepu with Western staff notation.
In his manuscript De la musique moderne des chinois (Paris, Bnf, Rés. Vmb. 14, 1754), Amiot explains the symbols used in gongchepu and also transcribes into Western staff notation the Chinese "air" Lieou ye king, later used by Carl Maria von Weber in his music for Friedrich Schiller's Turandot (1809). Five additional Chinese airs are presented exclusively in gongchepu. 
Amiot's most comprehensive work on gongchepu, however, appears in Paris, Bnf, ms Bréquigny 14 (1779). Bréquigny 14 consists of four cahiers, the first three devoted to Divertissements chinois, the fourth, to Musique sacrée, recueil des principales prières mises en muisque chinoise. In each cahier the music is presented first in mixed notation, placing gongchepu characters representing specific pitches in their appropriate positions on a five-line Western staff, with rhythmic symbols below the barlines. At the end of a cahier, each piece is repeated, entirely in gongchepu notation. 
Amiot's manuscripts of 1754 and 1779 represent a tradition begun by previous missionaries in China, some of whom, like Tomás Pereira and Teodorico Pedrini, were accomplished musicians who introduced Western musical instruments and music theory to the Qing court. Amiot's hybrid system of music notation reflects the continuing efforts of Jesuit missionaries in China to bridge the gaps between Chinese and European culture.