The limits of communication in any particular situation define the possible topographies of a musical event.  In order to sound a sonic image (whether predetermined or articulated in progress) a sonic community organizes its activities around the musical information that’s cuing which sounds happen when.  It’s this communication of information that animates the circulatory and nervous systems of a music.  What can be circulated, and therefore sounded, is constrained within the horizons of human capacity.  These horizons curve along the thresholds of memory, attention, interpretive capability, reflexes, ingenuity, habit, adaptability, intuition, technical facility and the generalizing and classification systems (whether personal or collective) that synthesize masses of musical information into manageable bunches.

         Notation — the visual mapping of sonic patterns (especially as developed in Europe since that region’s Middle Ages) — hosts an extraordinary prosthetic extension of memory that accomplishes a remarkably far reaching messaging system.  Its impact on musicking, on conceptualizations of music and on musical imagination is notably formidable.

         Long before synthesizers and digital quantization, notation codified abstractions of actual sound to a visual, legible and transportable system.  The now familiar, descriptive variables applied in musical notation include graphic representations of differences in pitch frequency (metaphorically depicted as “high” and “low” — in place of, say, faster/slower, thinner/thicker or smaller/larger), along with the sequential passage of sonic events plotted horizontally from left to right (as European languages are also written).  This mapping of “time” is further simplified into proportional, sequential bits.  ”Time” is segmented into progressive steps out of which are derived measures, meters and note values such as half-note, quarter-note, and so forth.  Notation, however, offers more than just a tooI.  The nature of its specifications articulates an editorially selective point of view regarding both sound and music.

         The French sociologist of science, Bruno Latour, in a paper entitled Drawing and Cognition: Drawing Things Together, considered the impact of perspective drawing and mapmaking in some ways at could be compared with notation’s relationship with music.  The development of a homogeneous Ianguage based in longitude, latitude and geometry, permitted the spatial relationships among components of an area of land (or, say, a building) to be fixed in a notated form that could travel and make that depicted location persuasively visible (or in the case of building, even replicable) to people in places far away.  Not only that, fictitious imaginings, whether hybrid fantasy or the design of a hypothetical machine, could be accessibly presented through these same media tools as “real.”

         Latour notes that:

 Papers and signs are incredibly weak and fragile. This is why explaining anything with them seemed ludicrous at first.  La Perouse’s map is not the Pacific anymore than Watt’s drawings and patents are engines, or the bankers’ exchange rates are the economies, or the theorems of topology are “the real world”.  This is precisely the paradox.  By working on papers alone, on fragile inscriptions which are immensely less than the things from which they are extracted, it is still possible to dominate all things and all people.  What is insignificant for all other cultures becomes the most significant, the only significant aspect of reality.  The weakest, by manipulating inscriptions of all sorts obsessively and exclusively, become the strongest.

         Latour also· points out that:

 Inscriptions are made flat.  There is nothing you can dominate as easily as a ‘flat surface of a few square meters; there is nothing hidden or convoluted, no shadows, no “double entendre”.  In politics as in science, when someone is said to “master” a question or to “dominate” a subject, you should normally look for the flat surface that enables mastery (a map, a list, a file, a census, the wall of a gallery, a card-index, a repertory); and you will find it.

         Just a few square meters of musical notation can enable a monological composer to design the construction of, for example, a four hour long sonic event that involves the coordination of over a hundred people — and to designate all of this in extremely fine detail.  The labyrinthine, even perplexing, passing by of actual sounds and patterns become shadow frozen, somewhat like Eadweard Muybridge’s early photographic motion studies.  Patterns can be arrested, investigated, reexamined and refined still further.  Notation in this way poses a sonic parallel with the drafter’s camera obscura.

         However, unlike the receptive depiction of physical objects and their relations in space relative to an observer, notation assertively reverses the exchange.  The abject weakness of an abandoned, unread sheet of score paper exposes a vital necessity that notation position itself as an irresistible and overwhelming social magnet in order to wax viable at all.  With the consensual amiability of sympathetic magic, notation introduces into the social relations of music a binding written contract that opportunes to dictate what is and isn’t “music” in terms of its own peculiar limits and possibilities.

         As tails wag dogs, musical notation shapes an entire sonic community around its requirements (and without an accommodating social network, notation can’t hold sway).  Participants must “feed the medium” through acquiring a fluency in its codes; and an entire educational culture (a sort of Bureau of Weights and Measures) has to develop to safeguard consistent and accurate correspondences between written description and sonic execution.  With all the commitment required to make notation practicable, it’s not so surprising that, in some circles, notated music comes to represent the very definition of “music” — period — with notation posing as border guard between composer and performer in a monological division of labor.

         The tactical advantages of socially supported notation are nevertheless pretty hard to dismiss. Its immense storage capacity can compensate for human cognitive limits in some remarkable ways.  The perspective stillness of paper can imaginarily “stop time.”  A composer can step aside from the pressures of sonic immediacy and inhabit instead a niche a lot closer to that of a studio artist or a novelist than to an active performer.  The reflective calm and isolation of paper (or electronic studio) composing favors an uninterrupted focal concentration that can be refreshed by walking away without worries that the preserved sonic patterns might dissolve, disappear or be forgotten (direct, live composing, in contrast, enjoys little to none of this luxury).  The archeological endurance of notation is even capable of withstanding the absence of a composer due to death.  As long as the cultural practices of decoding persist, a notated sonic pattern can be resuscitated over and over, regardless.

         Many of the unique inventions developed by European composers over centuries that have importantly contributed to the world’s musical inheritance may not have developed at all without the complicity of notation.  Early European notation may have first memorized, preserved and conveyed the already existing, unadorned, monophonic, text related, melodic shapes of Gregorian chant; but it’s hard to conceive how the Late Medieval Flemish composers or the Ars Nova could have constructed their complex polyphonies without detailed architectural sketches and renderings (and it may not be so coincidental that these intensely architectonic constructions were themselves designed for sounding within the cathedral acmes of that era’s architecture.).  Counterpoint, fugue, diatonic tonality, and Schoenburg’s pantonality are all complex generative techniques whose development required detailed trial and error comparison on par with that of a mathematician or physicist.  As Latour might argue, careful comparison of documentation is key to weeding out inconsistencies in the construction of a system.

         Within an interactive structure that channels most musical information by way of the page, not only does the eye vie for predominance over the ear, but, where paper comes to do most compositional “thinking,” performers actually don’t have to.  It may seem paradoxical, but diminishing a performer’s compositional responsibility allows more elaborate and dense musical information to be projected into a sonic image.  This is precisely because musicians, thanks to notation, don’t need to totally comprehend compositional messages in order for them to sound.  Transhuman scale can be broached in music by redistributing individual creativity out of performance.  Grandeur levies just a few costs.

         Notation, in return, has to calibrate itself to the cognitive limits of an average interpreter.  Specifications have to be trimmed to what can be relatively quickly assimilated by musicians who are already busily absorbed with their instruments and ensemble coordination.  The more eccentric and complicated written directives, the more time and attention has to be dedicated to processing that information at the expense of these other concerns.

         Notation connects most seamlessly when its language cleaves to the average, conventional and habitual.  What can be easily graphed, and easily averaged, best adapts to being notated.  Following the example of European practice, it seems as if pitch has shown itself to be the most adaptable sonic parameter for notation.  It might even be asked how much of Europe’s long time emphasis on melodic and harmonic development has been symbiotic with its system of notation.

         Other sonic components – timbre – complex, compelling but indescribable sonorities and textures – rhythm — tend to have to creep in through the kitchen door — usually with the help of a composer who’s willing to slip that door open while doing the uncharted heavy lifting and translation (Varese, Ellington or Xenakis, for example).  Conventional notation of rhythm – in contrast with its actual complexity — is schematically crude at best.  And once again, it could be asked if the relatively primitive cultivation of rhythm in traditional Euroclassical practice has been in part due to how difficult the essentials of rhythm — beyond the baseline of durations — are to notate.

         It’s worth considering how the default biases of notation might precondition what’s sonically cultivated.  Being able to graph the relative durations of sounds introduces a fantastic investigative tool; but superimposing the stopwatch click track of technical time across music also opens a share of questions.

         A graphic narrative illustrates “time” traveling in a straight line from beginning (represented as “left”) to end (right).  Time “really” does that?  Really?  The image portrays an undoubtedly useful tactical metaphor; but is it at all what either listeners or musicians actually experience as “time” – or rhythm — in (or out of) a musical context?

         What about the commonplace presupposition in some musical circles that a beat (or pulse) is the inert — or “dumb” — stuff that measures out the “real stuff” of “music” that’s doing the actual “speaking” — such as pitch, melody and harmony.  It’s true that rhythm portrayed as repetitive quantity can make for some pretty uninteresting viewing on a score; but the complicated vectors deployed by a Nuyorican mambo vamp, for example, are anything but simplistic, mechanical repetitions.  The multidirectional relationships among voices continually shift and redefine themselves in a way that never really settles or becomes “the same.”  And this is no accident at all because it’s a deliberate accomplishment of design.

         There’s yet to be a rhythm theory formulated and articulated with the thoroughness and conciseness that’s already been dedicated to diatonic harmony.  Theoretical rhythmic knowledge circulates in the face to face, person to person, experience based vernacular and is continually being rediscovered and worked out by each individual practitioner over and over; and it’s thriving pretty well outside the corral of notation.  The examples of both Indian and Pan-African practice suggest that more rhythmic information can be efficiently encoded and transmitted via “nonsense” syllable complexes than can be easily encapsulated through visual representations.  This can also be noted, for example, in how swinging so effectively eludes notated description.

         The constraints on what can be intelligibly and smoothly grasped within any system of notation inevitably favor presets that encourage sonic presuppositions that, by default, eliminate, if not disadvantage, all of the sounds not represented within the system.

         For example, the lattice of equidistant, tempered chromatic intervals, superimposed over the entire spectrum glissando of pitch, leaves out all the other pitches.  Sounds too idiosyncratic, or too complex, to fit into conventional notation’s apportioned slots may become habitually referred to as “noise.”  A descriptive tool such as notation can hardly avoid drawing insider-outsider oppositions that don’t actually apply to the sound palette of the real world.

         The immense conveniences of notation have to be accepted with at least some degree of salt.  In relation to the genuinely laborious and complicated social cooperations that construct musical sound, notation often contributes a helpful short cut.  Short cuts rarely tend to come cost free.  The totally literate composer Charles Mingus preferred instead to convey the details of his sonic constructs by ear whenever possible because the entire process of assimilation, so amply informed by unnotatable details, differs so much from sight reading and yields a distinctively different musical motion, attitude and sound.  Thelonious Monk would often only show a musician the sheet music for a composition after a musician had worked most of it out without the paper.

         Music (and musical ideas) is expensive.  It demands a lot of time and attention of its participants.  Notation slam-bam cuts to “the point” and emphasizes the literal sound and result — which does minimize a lot of time consuming digestion and comprehension (and many, many times, composers are more than happy to have the option).  It becomes possible to organize fly-by-night sonic realizations almost right on the spot (if the site readers are competent).  Beyond that, recordings and electronic sound generation can exponentially trump what notation’s ability with an amplified capacity to bypass the slow human challenges of information transfer in music.  Well, sometimes there just isn’t time to take the time.  Really.

         Who decides influences compositional structure the most. A music’s interactive structure adapts accordingly — with a corresponding impact on the music’s sonic image (this is the audible portion of the music that a listener hears). Interactive structure coordinates the flow of musical information within an ensemble; and musical information indicates which sounds happen when.  A compositional structure orients the areas of convergence and divergence around which an ensemble organizes itself.

These structures gather around two basic orientations.  If a music’s sonic image derives from the decisions of a single composer, its interactive structure could be called monological.  If a sound body accommodates the interchanges of more than one composer, its interactive structure could be understood as a dialogical one.  The two alternatives organize very different varieties of musical performance, while a range of differently proportioned mixed structures are able to blend these in a variety of ways.

The paths pursued by listening in the generating of musical sound leaves tracks along which one may follow the flows of information through a music’s interactive structure.  ”Listening to the listening” of the participants who design and sound a sonic image can open insights into how music behaves as event.

A composer, for example, listens to, and for, the unheard, — the not yet heard. A composer listens to, and through, imagination.  A composer also listens to, and for, a music’s listeners (and, after all, a composer is a listener as well).  A composer imagines the listener, imagines a meeting and relation of listener with sound.  All of this inflects the context from within which a composer chooses; and this is a listening that shapes the flow of the music’s corresponding sounds.

Within a monologically organized interactive structure, performers coordinate around the directives of a single compositional persona.  This persona may speak for one actual person (or “composer”). It may assemble the composite persona of an advance collaboration of contributors.  It may represent an inherited, collective, anonymous or “traditional” persona (or it may be posed as an otherwise adopted model for imitation).  Whatever the actual source, it’s this compositional persona who’s decided which sounds happen when.

The performers do not decide which sounds happen; and in this sense, they emphatically do not compose (although unavoidable gaps in any set of instructions always grant some latitude for interpretation).  Performers listen for a composer’s designated sonic image while they listen closely to each other in order to assure that its being achieved in accurate tandem.  Such careful uncertainty amid swift proximity to breakdown animates some of the essential tensions and heroism of musical performance.

In a monological format, musical information flows unidirectionally.  It’s relayed along a lineal, cause-and-effect sequence from “composer” (or model), to performer, to listener.  The steady reference signal of a designated sonic image is collectively accepted as non-negotiable and is bounded clearly by “right notes” and “wrong notes.”  Streamlining a music’s interactive structure this way helps establish a fairly unambiguous field of reference for ensemble convergence and divergence that collaterally frees each performer to concentrate ever more carefully on individual details of application.  Convergence assembles around appropriate and well coordinated execution, while divergence can only register as mistake.

         Divergence functions very differently in a dialogical structure.  A number of contributors venture compositional choices simultaneously while the music’s still emerging into sound.  It’s a mutually recognized condition that decision steams of collaborating composers have to just about immediately begin diverging from each other.  These centrifugal tendencies fuel and complement ongoing and ooIlective renegotiations of the music’s convergences.  Already alert to personal imagination, ensemble coordination and the evolving sonic image, dialogical composers listen to each other in order to decide what to play next.  Overall coherence develops as each participant draws (and draws upon) opportune connections among the sonic initiatives of one’s compatriots.

Compositional information in dialogical structures flows multidirectionally.  The interactions are complex, reciprocal and, in exact detail, unpredictable.  Initiatives are continually absorbed, reevaluated and transformed from as many different perspectives as there are contributors.  Sounds, patterns and concepts (a.k.a. musical “material”) assume an additional function alongside articulating a sonic image: they simultaneously communicate musical information among participating composers.  Structural communication is thus audibly externalized through the sounds of the music. They allow composers to “talk to” each other while these very same sounds address their audience. The composite sonic image of all of these interchanges reflects necessary feedback for continuing inventions and interventions.

Monological coordination leans deterministic where dialogical structures bend more probabilistic.  The first optimizes the clarifying advantages of stasis, while the other succeeds through homeostasis. With the exception of a capella solo improvisation, monological organization tends toward replicable, stable sonic imagery, while sonic images of dialogical music fluctuate in accordance with the curvature of its compositional interactions.

This intimate correspondence of musical sound with the compositional activities that generate it demonstrates that to more accurately “hear” a music involves more than participation in its sonic patterns.  There isn’t really any one-size-fits-all rubric for relating with musical sound as if it were ziplessly born out of some miracle of immaculate conception.  However else they may encounter a listener, sounds frame and indicate music’s more inaudible activities.

What’s inaudible in music?  Silence is acutely audible, but dance isn’t. Attention is inaudible — as are imagination, consideration, decision and coordination.  All may become evident through sound.  The invisible might turn corporeal while audibly dressed.

The activity of music isn’t so much literally heard as inferred through relationship with sound and through relationships among sounds.  The social structure of musical generation (which includes who decides what – when, where and how decisions are enacted – how this information circulates within an ensemble – and how they achieve sound) constitutes an indispensable component of a music’s composition, of how it’s put together.

While both monological and dialogical activity resonate sonic images, they each encounter a listener as different events.  To really be “heard,” each demands distinct and appropriate empathic calibrations of listening.

During a storyteller’s monologue, any variety of guises, disguises, ruses, voices or masks may be donned in the telling.  A monologist can deftly dissolve behind the specter of tale; but what keeps this event monologue is that it’s not interrupted.  The story emits from a solitary agent.  The relative dearth of interactive information in monological performance minimizes ensemble response and initiative in deference to the clarity of this single compositional signal.  There’s little doubt invited as to the responsible source of the music’s sonic design.

Monological methods don’t so much “solve,” once and for all, the challenges of structural communication and coordination in music as try to eliminate them through a somewhat fordist standardization that narrows ensemble interaction to its lowest possible minimum.  Interaction is kept so much the same every time that, regardless of the music sounded, it seems to disappear almost entirely as an element of musical structure.  Contrastingly, the acute interdependency of collaborating composers in dialogical music renders interaction and relationship central and indispensable components of musical composition.  The efficiency and success of monological organization relies on just one single species of social cooperation, while the possible configurations of interactive coordination figure more than can be counted.

One of the real wonders of music is that it can allow a listener to hear (and feel) a composer think (“thinking” is posed here as a whole body process that incorporates all the ways a person senses).  A monological format reveals the “thinking” of one compositional persona, while dialogical settings present the multiple contentions of a plurality of musical “thinkers.”  One essays the challenge of internal or personal congruence while the other communally refracts this same endeavor within a conversation of perspectives.

Along with its marked impact on musical sound, interactive structure also links with the social organization and conventions of the sonic community that sustains it.  A monological composer precipices the apex of a closed, command and control system.  However efficient this can be, the literal remoteness of a “remote control” system almost too easily exposes compositional directives to potential sabotage, carelessness, incompetence or sullen compliance — with the composer (well, at least a living composer) being the most likely to reap whatever blame there is to be had for the resulting sound.

The trust coordinating a monological composer’s conceptions with its executors perennially holds fragile. One response to this has been to rigorously standardize musicianship so that instrumentalists sound so nearly identical that they can achieve a sort of anonymous interchangeability (as is the case in Euroclassical training).  There are some very good reasons for this too. A thoroughgoing regularization helps insure that composers who design for particular instruments actually have a prayer of hearing what they’ve mapped out.

Standardization, however, can also ricochet back toward composers at a great expense to sound and conception.  Not only has many an “individualist” composer become heard only at the mercy of rigorous conventionalization, but many musical conceptions have had to be adapted to conventional terms and their accompanying social milieus.  Some avant-garde composers have attempted to break through this sort of impasse with a nearly unbearable weight of compensatory, micromanaged specification; but this also carries with it a downside that still smaller communities of musicians may become able and willing to sound the music.  And yet another progressively more available — and ever more popular — response to this dilemma has been to dispense with people altogether and offload this entire problem of musical transmission onto machinery.

Dialogical composers fare no less vulnerable to missteps and disruptions of collaborators, but this condition is equally shared by every contributor. A dialogical composer willingly foregoes monological responsibilities to a position of omniscience for an opportunity to intervene directly in music’s finding shape as it happens, to be able to change one’s mind — and to do this while in collaborative interchange with minds and sensibilities that are not one’s own.

Direct compositional control withdraws to within the reach of each composer’s own instruments and sonic initiatives.  When each assumes direct responsibility for sound generation as a performer, an ensemble coalition can be assembled with a lot less recourse to individual standardization.  A platform thus opens the sonic palette to idiosyncratic knowledge and capacity, to the one of a kind, the untamable, the unmappable, the unusual and the unanticipated.

A dialogical composer exchanges monological control over a music’s global sonic image for relationship.  Each participates in a more decentralized creative project, within which a network of connections is composed — and it’s this slightly transpersonal collective network that’s actually composing the music.

Within such a network, dialogical gestures become structurally provocative.  They’re angled not only to sound, but also to evoke response elsewhere in the flow of the music.  A volatile give and take ripples among the various decision streams that are generating the music.

A silence can accent ongoings in an ensembie just as powerfully as any flurry.  What counts is the relationship with context, placement, timing and the total synergy of interactions.  It’s not for nothing that Miles Davis practiced boxing from a specifically musical perspective.

Social organization can’t really be ostracized as either a core element of musical composition or as an important component of a music’s total aesthetic statement.  The momentum and impact of the social in musical composition, far beyond instrumental mechanics of how sounds are generated, has been insightfully assessed by Christopher Small in his Music of the Common Tongue:

“We are moved by music because musicking creates the public image of our most inwardly desired relationships, not just showing them to us as they might be but actually bringing them into existence for the duration of the performance.  This will clearly involve our deepest feelings, and thus the act of musicking, taking place over a duration of time, teaches us what we really feel about ourselves and about our relationships to other people and to the world in general, helping us to structure those feelings and therefore to explore and evolve our own identity….  ‘How do I know what I feel until I hear what I play?’  In musicking, in fact we are being touched in the deepest parts of who we are.”

The gaps between music imagined, music sounded and music heard nest composers in imperfectly resolvable, aesthetic and ethical conflicts of interest.  What’s more important — the sound or the way people interrelate?  What’s more valuable — a relatively egalitarian distributing of individual initiative and interaction, or a single individual assuming centralized command?  Is musical activity simply a technical means to a sonic end, or is the sound an indicative partner of the activity? What kind of world, developed through what kind of relationships, is worth cultivating?

These are social questions, questions of worldview, questions about a conception of the human, cosmological questions that don’t actually separate from decisions about sounds.  Social and sonic imagination aren’t automatically fit to each other in advance at all; and it might even be supposed that sounds likewise have their own (possibly quite contrary) social notions.

Composers can’t completely avoid at least implicitly taking a stand on these considerations.  Every time one composes, a social position is declared, or at the minimum, explored.  And, at the same time, those not-yet-heard sonic entities for which composers are responsible might be demanding social coordination appropriate to their needs irrespective of social vision.

There’s no perfect solution.  Monological music aspires for the most part to a stable sonic image that corresponds accurately with sonic imagination.  Sonic images are frozen at the cost of interactive motility on behalf of a reliable clarity and precision.  To keep an image stable and consistent, performers can’t afford to move out of line.  They can’t comment on the music.  They can’t talk back.  They can neither add to the music nor extend it.  Interactive aspects of music are kept as dead, comatose or suspended as possible.  The social structure is hierarchical and command based.

Bypassing direct human collaboration (and interference) — as does electronic studio, computer or otherwise generated sound — no less declares an attitude toward musical social interaction than does live music.  In absenting performers, this presents something of a post neutron bomb soundscape.  It’s for the most part, no less monological: but it is less hierarchical — if only because there’s no longer any people involved in the music’s generation process to be issuing commands to.

In multipersonic, interactive composition (a.k.a. collective improvisation), as composers move, so does sound.  A clear fidelity to an individually imagined overall sound runs fugitive because an improvising ensemble’s sonic image simply can’t stand still.  Communication among compositional personae can’t be hidden.  All of which displays some of the apparent “messiness” that horticultural forest gardening tends to show when compared with the surface tidiness of industrial agriculture — until one begins to consider all the internal connections that are (or aren’t) going on.  There’s a trade off in that monological organization hardly allows at all for recomposing interaction, whereas dialogical structures open to a musical composition of interaction and relationship itself.  This is yet something else to listen for.

Neither dialogical nor monological organization by itself at all guarantees “good” or “better” music.  Their dissimilarities are so location specific that comparisons of their interactive topographies can’t really say anything about the “quality” of a music being generated (which emerges instead out of how composers might navigate a particular terrain).  Neither can be “superior” to the other because they’re responding to different concerns.  And no one concern, whether sonic or interactive integrity, holds superior to any other either – but they are different; and these are distinctions decisively crucial for both composing and listening.

There are yet other ways of imagining relationships among these alternatives.  One would be to consider the speed of a composition’s evolution.  Some ideas evolve instantaneously.  Others molt and transform themselves very gradually – and slowly enough to mapped.  The movement and change between a series of “frozen” monological compositions might portray a very different process than would anyone of them in isolation.  The mutual influence and responsiveness of monological composers to each other shows a much slower kind of dialogue (even if not a part of performance) than does collective improvisation.  A composer’s ensemble might be structured where each participant alternately takes turn in composing for the others.  Then, there’s also composing for improvisers.  This opens a whole other spectrum of possibilities — and a very, very important one.

Unlike an individual plant, animals aren’t bound to a single location.  A composer can go monological on Sunday, dialogical all day Monday and mix it all up on Tuesday.  Sometimes the sonic image gets some; sometimes the interaction does.  Sometimes they talk to each other and work it out for a while.  Every moment, every position in the spectrum says something, means something.  At least, none of them are neutral.