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Part of
A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe
Edited by Olga Beloborodova and Dirk Van Hulle
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXV] 2024
► pp. 496–513

2.3.4
Music

Sketching performance

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 chapter 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.
Keywords: musical notation, performance, composition, music scores, music sketches, music manuscripts, music editions, Chopin, creative history
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