This post is an early draft of my PhD dissertations' introduction. Would love to hear your thoughts! Some citations are still missing.
Staff-based notation most readily supports the aesthetics and performance practices of Western Classical Music (WCM). As a legacy of colonialism, it is the most prevalent form of notation taught in conservatoires and universities not only in Europe, where it originated, but also throughout the Americas, in Australasia, and in parts of Africa and Asia. Contemporary staff-based notation is defined as the system that uses five lines and five spaces, a clef to demarcate range, and symbols that define pitches and their duration (Appendix A). The staff’s biases are skewed toward the organizing principles of specific pitches and duration. Like the English language, staff-based notation is also right to left dependent. WCM notation also relies on a hierarchy beginning with the composer, conductor/musicians, and ending with audiences. These biases and others may or may not pre-determine a Latinx composer’s process.
Throughout my career I have sought to escape these biases by working with dancers, theatre artists, and by engaging with my Mexican, genderqueer, and neurodivergent identities. Techniques I’ve used to break away from the biases of notation include Mexican instruments and performance practices (Diaz 2016a), using my PTSD as a partner in the creative process (rather than it being a hinderance), and compositional choices that undo the hierarchies inherent in the identity of ‘composer’ (Knotts 2015). However, I find that I keep reinforcing the biases of notation rather than escaping them, and, that there are moments within my compositional process where I find myself making decisions about whether to compose my true self—which often lies outside of the Eurological (Lewis 2002)—or submit, conform, and wear, as Frantz Fanon describes, a “white mask” (1967, 163-173). The notion of masking has also been explored in Autism studies. People who have PTSD sometimes show similar behaviours that autistic people show. One of these being masking due to the different ways we process information. Masking affords us an outward neurotypical identity temporarily but usually at great psychological costs in the long-term. Breaking down the various ways Latinx composers may or may not mask due to WCM notation’s biases will be central to the project.
An increasing number of music theorists, musicologists, performers, and other scholars have written on the problems the WCM industry has regarding race, gender, and disability (Thurman 2013; Ewell 2021; Knotts 2015; Doolittle and Banas 2018). Though composers falling outside of the white male norm have always managed to find places for themselves in the WCM ecosystem (Ngwe n.d.; de Brito n.d.; Slater n.d.), their works have frequently been marginalized, and they have been denied access to performances, financial supports, and recognition—continuing a pattern of erasure to be discussed below. Composing in WCM can be described as, ‘The appropriation of, and participation in, theoretical discourses is here a typical sign of an individual’s ability to join in and of [their] integration into a collective (Wenger 2002:55–57)' (Zembylas and Niederauer 2018:44). But what happens when the ‘collective’ has biases that are skewed toward the identities that fit into what bell hooks calls the ‘imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy?’ (bell hooks CIT). Inequalities continue to affect composers today (Doolittle and Banas 2018), having material effects on underrepresented composers’ ability to survive financially. Consequently, I find myself balancing whether including more of my Mexicaness, queerness, or neurodiversity in my music will directly affect a piece's performability and my ability to earn a living as an artist. This project then becomes a critique of WCM’s ties to the imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy. It will focus on exploring how the structural properties of staff-based notation may or may not be decentering the identities of Latinx composers in their compositional process and how notation itself keeps the normative self (cis, white, male, European, non-disabled) centred in the WCM ecosystem. How do nonnormative composers claim artistic sovereignty in their work and how does their sovereignty interact with the field at large?
The project’s central research question lies here in the connection between how the biases of staff-based notation affect the choices composers make in their creative process. And, more specifically, how these biases affect the artistic self’s sovereignty of Latinx composers from the diaspora and their identities in gender, race, and disability. This confrontation between a nonnormative self and the limits of notation is one that I believe white, cis, heteronormative composers rarely, if ever, experience in the same manner as nonnormative composers. For the nonnormative composer, this confrontation may be a dialectical tension between score and the self that further erodes the sense of the self rather than affirm it. This moment may dissemble the nonnormative self and cause a doubling in race, gender, and/or disability identities. For the normative composer, this moment may not be a confrontation that challenges the self but rather is experienced as a privileged philosophical or political moment that reaffirms their normative self. Nonnormative identities are promised freedom of expression through WCM’s notation of ‘universality’ but then may be limited by its biases. Coloniality’s promise of freedom, seamless assimilation, and standardization fail here and creates a tension between sound maker and score. It is this tension that the project will investigate through a method called Portraiture--to be discussed at length in the methodology section.
I argue that nonnormative composers may experience a similar ‘doubling’ or ‘dissembling’ in identity when using staff-based notation. An individual may possess identities that are fully supported by notation and simultaneously have identities that are actively repelled by it. This conflict is an effect of colonialism and is the very tool of oppression that represents “the White man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body”. In other words, the “disturbing distance in-between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness” is revealed in the compositional process by the decisions made by nonnormative composers. Some decisions may affirm their place within the Eurological notational framework while other choices may make visible the “disturbing distance in-between”. It is a mirage originally created to keep Black bodies enslaved and has evolved to keep other nonnormative bodies in a never-ending search for equality. Different composers deal with this gap differently and this project will study how Latinx composers navigate this liminal space to construct their compositional self.