Scores - Gallery Ubicua

SCORES invites artists to reflect on the challenges and compromises of music notation; each work explores the ephemerality of sound as it is transferred from one medium to another.

Curated by Edward Breen and Patricia Bossio


Music notation, especially Western staff notation, has a striking visual impact that many people recognise around the world. Just think of all those greetings cards adorned with cartoon illustrations of treble clefs and free-floating musical notes that readily signify festive musical sounds! Such symbols represent music even outside the context of a musical score, but it is often those same written symbols that are our only means by which historical musical ideas have survived for modern performance. I was fortunate to meet Patricia Bossio at The City Literary Institute (City Lit) where I was teaching a course about the history of music notation when she kindly invited me to join her in organising this exhibition, and it has been a great privilege as well as a great adventure to be a part of it.

This exhibition, the first of many we hope, focuses on works which either organise or represent musical sounds. From staff notation to lyrics, from ink on paper to ink in water, from live performance to video, we selected works that offer a variety interactions with musical scores so that in the Ubicua gallery space their ideas can bounce off each other, as well as us.

For me, the obvious starting point was lyrics. Fiona White’s embroidery suggested to me an arts-and-crafts influence, and her use of antique cotton evokes the pastness of the present by which I mean that these works in particular have prompted me to reflect on how all modern songs will one day become historical relics. An historical sensibilty also pervades the collaboration between Cecilia Mandrile & Lynn Bechtold as they reference the ancient belief that birds signify memories of our departed friends and family. When Western music notation began to first be used by Medieval monks it was to sing the songs of St Gregory, since they believed the entire corpus of ‘Gregorian chant’ was given to him by The Holy Spirit who appeared in the form of a Dove and sang it in his ear. From this legend we take the expression ‘a little bird told me.’

Rodrigo Arteaga’s work caused me to reflect on the ephemerality of scores, how their meaning can be so difficult to unlock when their contemporary context is lost. His work with notes made from seeds, oats and bacteria begins precisely placed but rapidly changes with time until just a blurred memory of the original score is discernible amongst the generations of new growth. Even less fixed is the piece by Jennie Yu where ink changes as sounds play to create an instantaneous real-time score. She democratises music by removing any assumption that you must be notationally literate to compose your own music.

Bob Whittaker works with jazz music which begins life as an improvisational practice and which is only ‘fixed’ in a score through a process of transcription rather than composition. Whilst his process captures real music details his emphasis is often on the emotional context of each piece, and the resulting geometric canvasses remind me of early 60s record-label logos such as CBS records who, incidentally, made recordings of Miles Davis.

Some works both capture sounds as well as music. In her video piece, Julieta Teitelbaum brings all sounds to a vivid foreground, which makes for an intimate yet powerful work amplifying daily ambient sounds as well as marginalised voices. In his pressed parchments, Tom Foulsham offers us a tactile representation of sound waves right on the border between physics and music which are at once playful as well as mathematically precise.

Diego Ontivero works with equisite and often intricate graphics that recalls the sense of wonderment; an awe that I have when viewing elaborate or dense notation systems. A whole language is contained within. This leads me full circle to staff notation:

Jorge Bosso responds to Mark Francis’ original painting by weaving an emotional bond for the audience - a sustained field of sound of multiple voices, captured in classical Western notation, now quietly hidden in a piano stool. Perhaps this will remind you of your own first contact with musical scores?