Musical Iconography and Dynamic Musicography

The experience of plastic art and musical notation for the reading of current music

Abstract

The aim of this text is music reading and performance. It is no surprise that the performers that approach written music after the second half of the twentieth century mention readability problems when approaching their writing. The expansion of music notation tradition —handwritten— and its computer writing —typescript— poses challenges that will continue harming the relationship between composers and performers if not solved. 

Although though pictorial ways of seeing seem far from musical habitus, we can find elements or hints that somehow allow building something like a sketch of musical orthography for complex music scores and dynamic scores —those that move during the interpretation of the music work. Thus, our object of study will be music notation, which, although intended for prosodic and lyric performance, has several uses in different fields, among them in plastic arts. In this way, we first observe a remote indication, to focus on the Fluxus movement, sonic installation, end with synesthesia; this observation will be explicit through the methodologies that plastic artists use of the musical notation. Finally, we conclude with a link to music notation visualization made by Dynamic Digital Scores. Between these two lines, we emit a hypothesis for the design of the movement's reading in the scores that use dynamic musical notation.