Séminaire / Conférence
Participants
  • Enrique Tomás (conférencier)

In my talk, I will defend that representationalism has a history and that non-linguistic approaches for writing music might be an alternative for music notation. As Derrida states when referring to Pierce's philosophy of notation: “From the moment that there is meaning, there is nothing but signs. We think only in signs”. Our Western traditional music notation, a collection of related symbols with a given and arbitrary meaning, should be understood eminently as a linguistic technology, but more important, decoupled from our cognition of embodied artifacts. As a result, these representational systems are difficult to apply when, for example, our music is created for digital and interactive instruments, or when it incorporates phonetic (non-linguistic) content. I argue that a “performative” understanding of writing music, which shifts the focus from linguistic and visual representations to discursive practices, is one such alternative for suggesting new musical practices of notation.

A Symposium on Notation for New Instruments and Musical Expression

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