type of cross-cultural piece: a work for the harpsichord player Jane Chapman with live electronics.

I wrote recently about the harpsichord (but it could apply equally to many of the instruments mentioned so far):

Any instrument has a cultural history within which it lives and which it carries around like a tortoise its shell, its mechanism the result of a process of evolution resulting from a complex of forces, musical, social and technological; perhaps none more obviously so than the harpsichord, revived in the 20th century with the rise of our museum culture and its search for an elusive ‘authenticity’. This gives it an air of ‘otherness’ – ‘both near and far at once’ – a double attribute which [. . . ] has been grasped and exploited by those adding a dimension to it through the use of electronics. (Emmerson (forthcoming)).

1.1.  Notation: its uses and limits; the relation with an aural tradition

The history and development of western art music notation needs to be rethought in terms which allow its advantages and disadvantages to be seen clearly.

The double ‘sieves’ developed for the notation of pitch (scale) and time (metre) have increasingly constrained western art music. We can see from the earliest transcriptions of Bartok in the villages of Hungary (and elsewhere) the clash of a notation designed for creating performance with the aims of a descriptive score he sought to make of such rich aural and oral cultures. The western notation system was plainly inadequate (for example, see Bartok 1976 p. 184)).

The function of western notation was to act to unify, standardise and simplify for universal application. It was also to undermine active memory: in the west we have lost the ability to memorise whole Homeric epics (and their musical equivalent), preferring to preserve and freeze their evolution at a given point in time and to make sacred such a fixed text.

Even in such a recent development as jazz we see the advent of notation, and hence individual ownership and copyright take over from a predominantly common holding of the oral traditions from which it sprang.

In Korea traditional Sanjo performances were learnt aurally in master/pupil relationships with flexibility only for the very experienced performer. These are now notated in detail in Western notation, although supplemented with detailed annotations in local script for ornamentation, and rhythm, though notated, is still a matter of study within the master/pupil tradition (see Pratt 1987 and Bang-Song 1982).

For a solo tradition this might work well, but it is often not fully understood that in most cases the introduction of western notation changes relationships within an ensemble. A group reading a score often needs common time; it relinquishes individual responsibility to a conductor/coordinator – a key freedom is surrendered.