Visualizing Performance? Music, Word, and Manuscript

Abstract

My essay deals primarily with the musical notation of German vernacular literature, focusing on the relationship between writing and sound. In the context of this essay, the term writing refers not only to the written text but also to graphics in general. In other words, writing refers to the musical notation and the layout of the page, as well as the verbal text itself. While modern editors normally concern themselves only with the verbal text, this chapter argues that all three components, music, word, and manuscript, comprise a visual whole that reflects the reality of the work. The visual components of a musical manuscript refer to the writer’s and reader’s memories and to the singer/performer’s sensorial (visual and acoustic) realization of the work. I use the term realization rather than performance because the latter implies that there is a work existing independent of the body of the singer—this is not the case with the phenomena dealt with here. The concept of work as an entity that is prior and superior to the transmitted text draws on the distinction made by Paul Zumthor in his seminal study of 1987, a distinction that has been taken up less frequently than his now ubiquitous concept of performance. ¹

Nisi emm ab homine memoria teneantur som, pereunt, quia scribi non possunt.

—Isidor, Etymologiae, Lib. XX, cap. III, 15

[If sounds are not retained in the memory of men, they perish, because they cannot be written down.]