(De)scribed performances: a techno-aesthetic approach to musical notation

The transition from orality to writing marked a cognitive revolution, allowing thought to be externalised and fixed on a permanent medium. This process also affects musical writing, which, although similar in some respects to verbal writing, has important differences: written music does not produce a literary art as in the case of verbal writing, since musical literature does not constitute an aesthetic experience in the mere act of reading (Dahlhaus 1982). A piece of music is not merely a contemplative aesthetic object, but an exploratory and multimodal experience that combines auditory, sensorimotor, cognitive and affective elements. The musical creative process is not simply the transcription of an idea, but a performative act that involves playing, listening and creating, participating simultaneously in the nature of a work of art and a technical artefact. The introduction of notation made possible a cognitive revolution that paved the way for motets, madrigals and twelve-tone music. Polyphony, as ethnomusicological studies have also confirmed, did not originate from the manipulation of sound visualised on a graphic medium through the visual superimposition of voices, as has long been mistakenly believed (Busse Berger 2005); rather, the use of notation made it possible to master musical architectures that expanded compositional and performative possibilities. The development of polyphony at the School of Notre Dame offers fertile ground for such an investigation, as it is possible to gain an insight into the transition from monody to polyphony by comparing the manuscripts that have come down to us. Notation, as an intermodal medium (Parisi 2019), made possible a sensory hybridisation that radically transformed creativity. Understanding the phenomenon of polyphony in the light of these considerations allows us to emancipate ourselves from a prejudice that has been present in the history of music since time immemorial. It is an idea that traces back to Cartesian dualism and ascribes to cultivated Western composers the creation of rigorously written “high” pieces of music, works of art in the modern sense, the prerogative of the res cogitans, in which performance was merely a secondary effect. This techno-aesthetic approach to musicality also agrees to break down the wall that divides written and performed music into two separate ontological levels. The introduction of a sophisticated technology such as notation, did not “kill” performance, but allowed for the graphic representation of pitches and rhythms and also had a significant impact on the visual memory and visual-mental organisation of the composition, with significant consequences on cognition itself and participatory sense-making (Schiavio and De Jaegher 2017)