Polyphony's genesis, the quantum score and entangled musical aesthetics. How notation shapes the musical mind

This paper explores how musical notation has transformed our fundamental cognitive engagement with sound, the nature of musical aesthetics, and the way we create and preserve music. The transition from oral traditions to written forms precipitated a cognitive revolution, thereby enabling the externalisation and preservation of thoughts. While there are similarities between this transition in music and verbal writing, there are also key distinctions. In contradistinction to literary texts, musical scores do not offer a complete aesthetic experience through mere reading (Dahlhaus, 1982). Instead, music is an exploratory, multimodal experience that weaves together auditory, sensorimotor, cognitive and affective elements. The creative process is not merely the transcription of an idea; rather, it is a performative act involving play, listening and creation, and the blending of the nature of a work of art with that of a technical artefact. The advent of notation enabled a significant cognitive shift, paving the way for complex forms such as motets, madrigals and twelve-tone music. As ethnomusicological studies confirm, polyphony did not simply emerge from visualising and superimposing voices on a graphic medium (Busse Berger, 2005). Rather, notation empowered musicians to master intricate musical structures, vastly expanding compositional and performative possibilities. The development of polyphony at the School of Notre Dame provides a valuable case study, enabling us to trace its evolution by comparing existing manuscripts. As an intermodal medium (Parisi 2019), notation facilitated sensory hybridisation, thereby effecting a radical transformation in creativity. The present study posits that an understanding of polyphony through this particular lens assists in transcending the long-held prejudice, rooted in Cartesian dualism, that frequently relegates Western cultivated music to a purely intellectual realm. This is a realm in which the composition of music is considered to be "high art" and performance is merely a secondary effect. This techno-aesthetic perspective on musicality also challenges the strict ontological division between written and performed music. The advent of musical notation, far from diminishing performance, furnished a visual depiction of pitches and rhythms. The impact of this phenomenon on visual memory and the visual-mental organisation of compositions was significant, with substantial consequences for cognition itself and participatory sense-making (Schiavio and De Jaegher 2017). From this perspective, the musical score can be viewed as a site of aesthetic quantic entanglement, connecting diverse temporalities and aesthetics in a non-linear fashion. In the quantum state of the score, a superposition of all possible aesthetic and performative outcomes is posited. The act of performance thus constitutes the collapse of the wave function, whereby the system actualises into a specific, determinate state. The dynamic interplay between the potentiality of the score and its realisation in performance highlights how the music aesthetically fully actualises in that entangled state.