Handwritten Musical Notation
I’ll be honest, despite many offers from friends to offload their grandparents’ sheet music collections, I have never really had much interest in musical notation.
I don’t read music, so to me it functions much like the handwritten notes and ledgers that I often use in my collages. It is essentially asemic. “Asemic” is a word I learned only a few months ago and have been delighted to use whenever possible. It describes marks that resemble writing but carry no readable meaning. To someone who cannot read the language, the page becomes a pattern of lines, shapes, and gestures rather than a system of information.
That changed when I discovered handwritten musical notation. Once the music was written by hand, I had a way in. Suddenly the pages held the presence of the person who made them: the careful scales, the hesitant corrections, the repeated practice of someone learning their way through a melody.
I still cannot read the music, but I can read the hand. In my Handwritten Seas series, these sheets of music become landscapes. The staff lines form horizons and the scattered notes rise like mountains across the surface of the collage.
