'Making, Not Filling Time': Time and Notation in Improvised Musical Performance

Improvisation and notation are frequently opposed in terms of transience versus permanence, an opposition that reflects broader Eurocentric ideas of orality and literacy. Confronting such binary distinctions, Schuiling describes the use of notation by three groups of improvising musicians, showing how notations mediate their understanding of time. This forms the basis of a critique of Alfred Schütz’s influential account of social interaction in musical performance. Schuiling argues that Schütz’s distinction of an ‘inner time’ of music and an ‘outer time’ mapped by the score remains tied to a work-centred musical ontology, and fails to attend to the making of time in the course of performance. Drawing on his fieldwork, Schuiling reconsiders the work of Maurice Halbwachs, the primary target of Schütz’s argument. Rather than understanding music as an object of inner contemplation, Halbwachs provides a view of music and temporality as a way of opening up to the world.