Introduction

This essay came out of a desire to step back and reflect on which aspects of composition come to the fore when a score is made up of media other than conventional notation on paper. In recent years, we’ve witnessed a decline in the use of paper in music performance, with PDF files and other digital formats increasingly taking ­­­its place. Musicians now often rely on tablets as their primary medium for reading music. Despite the technological possibilities enabled by the digitisation of musical information—offering new ways to rethink the concept of musical composition—the majority of new music still relies on traditional score formats.

This is not intended as a critique of traditional practices, and I am not advocating for a revolution. Composition using conventional scoring methods will endure as long as the culture of Western classical music persists, and great works will undoubtedly continue to be created in this manner. I, too, remain deeply connected to these conventions and will likely continue to compose within them. However, I sense that there are exciting possibilities for organising sound and redefining the relationships between musicians that extend beyond this. This essay is a way of thinking about some of the potential that lies in rethinking the function of a score.[1]

So, what kinds of score is meant by the term “media score”? At the beginning of this research, I initially focused on so-called “interactive scores”— these are scores that can listen and adapt in real time based on an algorithmic programme, creating a feedback loop with the musicians, enabling them to shape and navigate the music. This was the type of work that my colleague Anne La Berge and I were creating and performing with Ensemble MAZE. However, I soon encountered other innovative scores that didn’t fit within this category but were equally worth investigating. I began referring to this broader category as “hyperscores”, until I realised that this term had already been used to describe a software developed by MIT Media Lab for computer-assisted music composition in educational contexts. It became clear that there was no need to invent a new term—many labels already existed for these types of scores: digital score, screen score, audio score, score-app, situational score, animated score, real-time score, generative score, metascore, polyvalent score, 3D scores, immersive score and netscore to name some examples. Ultimately, I chose the more generic and encompassing term media score to cover all these practices^⁠. On the MIT website^⁠ this is defined as:

“Media scores extend the concept of a musical score to other modalities in order to facilitate the process of authoring and performing multimedia compositions."[2]

My own definition would expand the notion so that it is not only about the use of the musical score to describe other media, but other media used to describe musical elements. Rather than narrowing the conception of a media score to a fixed medium, this definition extends it and opens up to other modalities, in a myriad of ways:

“A media score is a framework that extends the musical score beyond traditional notation, not only using musical principles to structure other media but also allowing other media and non-musical elements to shape the composition.”

The idea for the structure of the paper, was inspired by Italo Calvino’s short book of lectures, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which he wrote toward the end of his life (though he never had the chance to deliver them). In this book, Calvino identifies certain qualities in literature that he believed would be significant in the next millennium. He discusses lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, with an unfinished final chapter on consistency. This inspiration led me to approach the paper in a similar way, exploring the various qualities and attributes that media scores offer as a way of rethinking what composition can be in light of our rapidly changing technological landscape.

Nine attributes are given here, as a way discussing the possibilities inherent in media scores: hypermediacy, aboutness, transparency, adaptability, interactivity, multimodality, generativity, spatiality and mutability. Once again, I want to emphasise that this does not imply that traditional notational systems and compositional practices lack these qualities. Rather, these qualities are brought to the fore or highlighted through the shift in media. In each chapter, I present examples of works I have come across, some of which I have performed with ensemble MAZE, and chosen because they highlight specific aspects of these attributes. While there are undoubtedly other pieces that might serve as more fitting examples, I focus on works I am intimately familiar with, allowing for deeper insights. At the end of each chapter, I also discuss some of my own compositions, illustrating how the unique qualities of the media score have influenced my creative process. The final chapter, Mutability, includes an extensive exploration of my most recent work of the same name. This piece, composed during the course of this research, is deeply intertwined with many of the ideas explored in this essay.

Technology plays a pivotal role in many of these ideas. Just as the Gutenberg press revolutionised the preservation and dissemination of printed scores, the digital age has introduced numerous new ways of organising and enabling musical practice—from the use of software at the outset of a project to the streaming of music online. A recurring theme in works that leverage technology in innovative ways is the relationship between human and non-human agency. Similar to how a traditional score codifies a musical idea for musicians to interpret and perform, software that serves as an interface between musicians’ functions as different form of codification, whether that is in the form of an interface, algorithm, or set of rules.

And just as musical instruments continually evolve, so too does the media we use in describing their possibilities. Making definitive assumptions about the future form media scores might take would therefore be overly presumptuous. For now, I will stick to describing their current qualities in nine brief chapters.