Was 1974 the End of Music History? Universalism, cybernetics, and the International Conference of New Musical Notation
Giulia Accornero · 2022
This chapter shows how efforts to standardise postwar notation, promoted by the Index of New Musical Notation (1970–1974, New York), share basic assumptions with Hegel&s;s and Fukuyama&s;s infamous ‘end of history’. I demonstrate that the Index, like many contemporary composers, projected the teleological development of Western Art music as a story of the progress of its notation towards a final moment of perfection and reinterpreted music-historical events in relation to this narrative. The creation of a universal standard that could accommodate different notational aesthetics relied on the cybernetic paradigm, which held humans and machines as equivalent. Within this paradigm, notation was understood as the codification of the musical message into an informational signal. Ultimately, however, the Index did not bring about an end to music history. Instead, the cybernetic equivalence of man and machine brought composers down from the transcendent plane they had occupied, elevating media as historical agents in the process. The chapter argues that recognising notation as an agent that can shape musical narratives and instantiations provides a pathway to rewriting the very concept of history in the ‘history of music’.