Drawing Music, Marking Time: The design, structure and impact of musical notation
David Griffin
Jan 2025 · Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
168
Pages
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More
About this ebook
Marking down the complexities of musical pieces on paper allows them to become portable, shareable, and eminently teachable, but how are the simple geometries of a music notation unfolded into space and time?
A music notation is an almost impossibly complicated bit of drawing. Calling it a map or a diagram does not quite do the trick. Its tracery supplies mechanisms for planning, composition, analysis, annotation, and performance of music. But how is it that we read that simple, strategic two-dimensional geometry and make such complex, four-dimensional performances? In this book David Griffin guides readers to a comprehensive understanding of the structural properties of music notations, with a particular focus on the standard Western staff notation system, looking at composers such as Bach, John Cage, Earle Brown and Stockhausen.
Developed over a thousand years ago, the staff notation is a geometrical drawing method using dots and lines on a horizontal timeline for explaining the structure of a musical piece. The system behaves a bit like a picture, but it is also like a diagram, and a bit like writing in its structure. In the hands of an experienced user, the notation's complex of marks and phatic elements allows us to leave behind the mere denotation of diagrams or pictures to become a connotative drawing system.
This book will attempt to de-code music drawings, untangling their strange knots of graphic and linguistic elements. Using a series of visual examples, Griffin presents background information on how the staff notation developed as an inter-linguistic inscription, a drawing that slips through the mere denotation of pictorial or diagrammatic graphics to become a connotative system, with which we may craft subtle and powerful elements of musical poetry.
A music notation is an almost impossibly complicated bit of drawing. Calling it a map or a diagram does not quite do the trick. Its tracery supplies mechanisms for planning, composition, analysis, annotation, and performance of music. But how is it that we read that simple, strategic two-dimensional geometry and make such complex, four-dimensional performances? In this book David Griffin guides readers to a comprehensive understanding of the structural properties of music notations, with a particular focus on the standard Western staff notation system, looking at composers such as Bach, John Cage, Earle Brown and Stockhausen.
Developed over a thousand years ago, the staff notation is a geometrical drawing method using dots and lines on a horizontal timeline for explaining the structure of a musical piece. The system behaves a bit like a picture, but it is also like a diagram, and a bit like writing in its structure. In the hands of an experienced user, the notation's complex of marks and phatic elements allows us to leave behind the mere denotation of diagrams or pictures to become a connotative drawing system.
This book will attempt to de-code music drawings, untangling their strange knots of graphic and linguistic elements. Using a series of visual examples, Griffin presents background information on how the staff notation developed as an inter-linguistic inscription, a drawing that slips through the mere denotation of pictorial or diagrammatic graphics to become a connotative system, with which we may craft subtle and powerful elements of musical poetry.
About the author
David Griffin is Assistant Professor at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, he holds a PhD from the Glasgow School of Art, an MFA from the Pratt Institute, and BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York.
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
