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Becoming music

Griffin, David (2018) Becoming music. Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 3 (2). pp. 151-170. ISSN 2057-0384 (Submitted)

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp.3.2.151_1

Abstract

Following a confused encounter with a music manuscript, the author explores the underpinnings of that experience, to understand the nature and structure of music notations as drawing systems. A music notation is an almost-impossibly complicated bit of drawing. Calling it a map does not quite do the trick, even if the page somehow works like a map. Labelling it a diagram, typically a didactic visual tool, is off the mark as well. Furthermore, the traditional western staff notation, as an example with historical authority, happens to be a richly developed system for reading and writing, for composition. This mixed bag of structure and function makes the staff notation a persistently vital teaching tool, even in our vexing era of computational solutions. In its hybrid display, a music notation gives its many user-communities a strategic, two-dimensional mechanism for cross-modal analysis and annotation, and ultimately performance of its content, in higher dimensions. How does a music drawing relate to other drawing systems? And how is it that we are enabled to fix and re-fix the multi-dimensional complexes of musical performance onto a page?

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: The following is a post-print manuscript © 2018 Intellect Ltd The final version is available from the publisher: doi: 10.1386/drtp.3.2.151_1
Uncontrolled Keywords: art; diagram; drawing; language; music; notation; sketching
Divisions: Faculty of Art
Date Deposited: 10 Dec 2018 19:51
Last Modified: 20 Dec 2021 18:47
URI: https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/2427

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