Music: Sketching Performance

Abstract

This chapter begins by acknowledging the impossibility of capturing musical thought in notational form and by highlighting the concomitant provisionality of music scores. It then considers the creative input required of performers when they bring musical notation “to life” in sound and in time. This leads to a case study on the Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin, for whom the act of notation posed innumerable difficulties not least because he continually reimagined and revised his musical ideas. The essay as a whole thus challenges any assumptions we might have about the identity and stability of the Chopin work and of music more generally, while also raising thorny questions about the best means of representing music’s creative history in editions and performances themselves.