Music notation is a fundamental tool for conveying meanings in music and its interaction with verbal language provides valuable insight into musical discourse. The acquisition of both linguistic and notational literacy is important for the academic success of music students who must demonstrate their knowledge and ground their practise through written texts. This paper presents a framework adapted from Unsworth and Cléirigh (2009) for the intersemiotic analysis of language verbalising notation in student research texts. The analysis identifies the valued qualities of notation, the roles of both human and musical participants and the musical and textual circumstances of notational quotes. It further identifies manner and effect as contextually significant aspects generally outside the semiotic potential of notation which are presented in accompanying text. This paper draws on research into the academic literacies of jazz performance students to provide a descriptive foundation for the analysis of writing about music. key words music notation, systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis, performance, jazz, student text, intersemiotic, multisemiotic
Music notation is intrinsic in the composition and performance of Western art music and also in its analysis and research. The process of writing about music remains underexplored, in particular how excerpts of music notation are selected and arranged in a written text, and how that text describes and contextualises the excerpts. This article applies ‘semantic gravity’ from Legitimation Code Theory to characterise notational excerpts and their integration in a written text, by focusing on how closely they are connected to a particular performance or generalised across performances. It illustrates these concepts with case studies of tertiary students’ research projects to reveal how different purposes drive different notational usage when writing about music. This provides insight for music educators on how to support writing about music and the use of notational quotes.
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