Casi cerca (2004)- score fragment
I like to think of written music as an entity that originates itself every time it is invoked. Unlike other arts, where the physical object is always present, live music exists only when it is played (and in the context of this article, read from a musical score).
Music uses a foreign language to express itself, not through sound waves but through graphical signs. This indirect mechanism gives music an ambiguous condition in both its sound and discourse. Ambiguity brings both fragility and strength simultaneously.
The history of Western music has always danced alongside the development of musical notation, each feeding the other in an indivisible relationship. Musical notation serves not only as a tool to preserve sound waves in the correct order, but as a way of thinking and creating music. Much of the written music we know today would have been impossible to conceive without the practice of recording ideas on paper. Music notation is both a recording and a generative activity at the same time.
Music scores are meticulous, specific, and obsessive with details. The wonderful paradox is that this precision is expressed in a live performance. Written music finds its full expression in the present moment: fresh and fragile. This imperfect-perfect, defined-undefined, precise-imprecise double-sided coin is the fascinating arena that gives music its abstract condition.