Music unfolds in time. It happens, vanishes, and leaves behind only its effects on those who were present. And yet, across cultures and centuries, we have insisted on writing it down.
This impulse appears obvious: notation preserves, transmits, and stabilises music. But ontologically, it does something far more consequential. When music is written, it is no longer only an event of collective coordination; it becomes an object of abstraction. Readiness does not disappear — but it is transformed.
To see how, we must once again begin from music as event.
Music as Event: Readiness in Time
As previously argued, instrumental music operates as a modulation of readiness. It coordinates bodies through timing, anticipation, pressure, and release. Its power lies in emergence: in the mutual adjustment of performers and listeners within a shared temporal field.
Music, in this sense, is not a thing but a happening. It exists only in its instantiation, only as the cut of a particular moment of coordination. There is no music behind the performance — only the potential for music to occur again.
The Appearance of Notation: Music Becomes a System
Musical notation interrupts this ephemerality. A score is not music, but it is also not merely a memory aid. It is a symbolic system that specifies the conditions under which musical events may be produced.
Notation therefore functions as a theory of music: a structured articulation of possible instances. The score does not sound; it constrains how sound may occur. In ontological terms, it shifts music from event to system.
Performance now appears as an instance of something abstract. Music acquires a type–token structure it did not previously require.
What Notation Does to Music
The abstraction introduced by notation reconfigures musical function in several decisive ways.
Time Is Spatialised
Notation converts temporal flow into spatial arrangement. Beats are aligned to measures, durations to note values, progression to horizontal extension across a page. Musical time becomes something that can be seen rather than only enacted.
Readiness, once felt collectively, is now organised against an external grid. Anticipation is calibrated not to others, but to marks on a page.
Possibility Is Constrained
The score specifies what may occur, when, and in what relation. While interpretation remains possible, deviation is no longer neutral. It becomes error, style, or deliberate transgression.
Readiness is still required to perform, but it is now readiness to comply with a pre-established structure.
Authority Is Relocated
With notation, authority shifts away from the collective emergence of performance and toward the abstract object of the score. Correctness becomes a dominant value. Coordination is no longer negotiated in real time; it is pre-scripted.
The centre of gravity moves from coordination to execution.
Musical Theory: Readiness Under Rule
Musical theory extends this abstraction further. Harmony, counterpoint, and form do not describe how music feels; they articulate how music ought to be organised.
Within theory, readiness is reinterpreted as expectation: tension seeks resolution, instability seeks rest, deviation seeks justification. What was once an open modulation of potential becomes a structured anticipation governed by conceptual rule.
Music is no longer merely enacted; it is understood.
What Abstraction Enables
This transformation is not accidental, nor is it merely restrictive. Notation and theory enable:
large-scale coordination across many performers,
transmission of complex musical forms across generations,
musical architectures impossible to sustain through collective emergence alone.
Abstraction allows music to scale — socially, temporally, and institutionally.
What Is Lost
At the same time, abstraction carries a cost. As music becomes object and rule, readiness risks becoming subordinated to discipline. Performance becomes reproduction. Coordination becomes obedience to form.
Music may still move bodies, but the movement is increasingly guided by instruction rather than mutual attunement.
Again, this is not a lament. It is an ontological observation.
Beyond the Score
Lyrics transformed music by introducing meaning. Notation transforms music by introducing abstraction. Both reshape readiness without eliminating it.
In contemporary contexts — recording, automation, algorithmic composition — abstraction proceeds even further. Readiness is no longer only coordinated or instructed; it is engineered.
Music, once a fleeting coordination of bodies, now participates in the broader organisation of possibility itself. And it is there — beyond sound, beyond score — that the next questions await.
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