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
