Hacia una epistemología decolonial de la notación musical

Abstract

Musical notation appears as a problematic aspect in the debate about the forms of coloniality of knowledge. It is often seen as an instrument of domination because it imposes itself as a mode of representation for music coming from oral tradition, which finds innumerable limitations in the notation for its record. The epistemology of musical notation that is questioned here as hegemonic is that which: (i) limits its possibilities to academic repertoire; (ii) warns about its (in)ability to register other music; (iii) limits and reduces its function to that of a register; (iv) encourages the development of reading skills in particular; and (v) assumes the activity of reading as decoding and writing as codifying with its concomitant pedagogy. This epistemology entails a Eurocentric perspective of musical notation that has colonized music education, naturalizing not only in the fields of musical training, but also in ordinary life.

In this article we propose to question that epistemology, providing empirical evidence and arguments that allow us to estimate alternative assumptions for thinking about musical notation as a system of representation, with the consequent decolonial possibilities that this implies.