Drawing Music, Marking Time: The Design, Structure and Impact of Musical Notation

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 lines encode mechanisms for the planning, composition, analysis, annotation, and performance of music. But how is it that we transform those simple two-dimensional marks into 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 focus on the standard Western staff notation system, looking at composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, John Cage, Earle Brown, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Developed more than 1,000 years ago, the staff notation is a geometrical drawing method in which dots and lines on a horizontal timeline are used to denote the structure of a musical piece. The system works like a picture, like a diagram, and like writing. In the hands of an experienced user, its complex of marks and phatic elements goes beyond the mere denotation of diagrams or pictures to become a connotative drawing system.

In the book, Griffin decodes music drawings, untangling their strange knots of graphic and linguistic elements. Using a series of visual examples, he presents background information on the way the staff notation developed as an interlinguistic inscription, a drawing that slips through the mere denotation of pictorial or diagrammatic graphics to become a connotative system, with which we can capture the subtle but powerful elements of musical poetry.