... the hairpin debate - the score as map, not territory, nor law: prescriptive versus descriptive notation ...

    Recently, a Ben Laude video (and a subsequent response by pianist Denis Zhdanov) on the “real” meaning of the "notational hairpin" (cresc., dim., etc.) in the classical music world/guild/community sparked a very intense and lively debate. A dear friend sent me both videos, together with references to a marvelous book on notation by Roberto Poli which I have read. I wrote a response that seemed to strike at some other questions, and I thought it might be of interest beyond our private exchange. I share it here publicly, without revealing the identity of my friend, a wonderful person, pianist, and teacher, and adding also some subsequent thoughts about the issues at stake. 

"Dear ….., 

 

    Thank you for your message. I’d like to respond calmly and philosophically: I think you’re right to follow these discussions, as I think they’re necessary, but it seems to me that the crux lies less in what Poli, Zhdanov, or Laude say about “hairpins” (crescendo and diminuendo signs, speaking functionally) than in what they do not say: that is, the tacit assumptions underwriting their discourses. In my view, those assumptions are very strong ontological commitments: namely, about what kind of “things” music, notation, and performance are; commitments which are rarely made explicit and yet silently steer all their practical and aesthetic conclusions.

    Allow me to unfold this with a bit more substance.

    Tacit assumptions: what stands behind their discourse?

    Authors who treat notation as prescriptive (rather than descriptive) operate, at minimum, with the following unspoken beliefs:

     Notation is law. The staff, the rubric, the dynamic marking function as mandates: “do this.” The score is a juridico-musical text prescribing conduct.

    The work exists in the graphic. The ontological identity of the musical work coincides with what is written; the “correct” performance is the one that replicates the graphic design.

 

    Univocity of sign → sound. An almost mechanical relation between script and sound is presumed: a given sign has a single correct sonic value or set of values.

 

    Priority of the written record. Writing is more reliable than oral memory or performance tradition: oral practices are subordinated to the “text.”

 

    Interpretive neutrality. Fidelity is understood as conformity; errant or creative interpretation is suspect because it departs from prescription.

    Why does this matter? (practical and theoretical consequences)

    These assumptions yield concrete effects:

     Literalism and the reduction of interpretive agency. The performer is pushed toward a kind of technical obedience; their creative role is impoverished.

 

    Apologetic or conservative historicisms. An “archival” reading of the work is favored: editing, restoring, fixing. Music becomes a museum object (see Lydia Goehr, Taruskin, etc). 

 

    Hermeneutic impoverishment. The richness of ambiguity is lost; incomplete or polysemous notational cues are treated as defects rather than as indices of practice.

 

    Technologization of the musical. Tools that privilege discrete values (MIDI, DAWs, computerized scores) reinforce the illusion of a one-to-one graph–sound (graphos-phonos) correspondence.

My position: the prescriptive versus descriptive distinction is crucial.

    For me, notation is not, first and foremost, a recipe for behavior (a behavioural cue, a prescription); it is a description, a descriptive, indexical, interpretive system. This implies several things:

 

    Notation describes habits, micro-traditions, possible gestures. It often points to a family of plausible realizations rather than a single correct execution.

 

    It is an instrument of memory and communication, not a closed code. It permits the reconstruction of performative vectors but constantly demands a certain, very specific kind of mediation: the performer completes the sense.

 

    The graphos–phonos link is always probabilistic, historical, and pragmatic. There is no logical univocity; there are cultural, pedagogical, and institutional dependencies.

 

The work is realized in the event. Ontologically, music is act (performance) rather than mere graphic object; the score enables that act, it does not foreclose it.

    I’ll give a simple, meaningful example. Consider ornaments in historical traditions: they are often indices (signs, clues, pointers, or, in semiotic terms, indexes, a technical term from Peirce’s semiotics), not recipes. A trill, an appoggiatura, a slur line in old manuscripts signal modes of behavior that depend on local practice, on instrument, on listener. To treat such signs as “orders” is to lose the historical web that makes them intelligible.

What practical proposal follows from all this? For me, if we want to move the debate forward, we should:

         Make ontological commitments explicit. Whenever someone argues for a reading, let them declare whether they conceive notation as law or as map.

 

    Insist on hermeneutic plurality. Acknowledge that a score admits repertoires of realization and that the performer’s authority is part of the musical phenomenon.

     Study notation as a social and historical practice. Investigate how musical communities have read these signs in concrete contexts.

     Mind our language. Avoid speaking of “the correct” without nuance; prefer formulations that recognize degrees, probabilities, and traditions.

 

    To conclude: your intuition about the “palette of greys”, instead of blacks and whites, is exactly what we need to avoid false extremes. Poli or Zhdanov can indeed help put topics on the table (and welcome they are) but the discussion requires that you press on what they leave unspoken: their ontological assumptions. That is where the real battlefield lies: in how we understand what notation is, what the work is, and what it means to interpret. And on that terrain, the performer is not a mere receiver: they are the temporary co-author of the musical event.

     Let’s keep talking: I’m very interested in your reading of Zhdanov’s video, the Laude video, and Poli’s text, and whenever you wish, I can comment in greater detail on the concrete arguments they offer, yet always from that vantage point: what they take for granted about the nature of notation and of music.

     I would like to add something I consider essential: in all these discourses, in the end, the map is confused with the territory. The relation between graphs and phones is not bi-univocal; it does not function like the die and the coin in the striking process. There is no exact imprint, no neutral mirror, no immediate transparency. Notation is, rather, allegorical and symbolic: it describes much more than it prescribes. This distinction between prescriptive and descriptive notation, formulated already by Charles Seeger is, in my view, compelling, because it confronts us with the problem of literalism. 

 

    It is the same literalism that accompanied Luther’s sola scriptura, in contrast with the earlier tradition of allegoresis, of hypónoia, of the symbolon, where the text always referred beyond itself, to something that exceeds its own technical facticity.

 

    A score is a map, yes, but never the territory. It is a trace, a text, a mark; and one makes music with it, but not by servile copying, as if we were to reflect it in a mirror. The performer is not a neutral mirror, as such interpretive neutrality does not exist, but an embodied consciousness that opens the score to its sonorous being. The decisive question, then, is not how one plays what is written, but from which ontology one reads that writing. 

 

    And this, to me, is where Poli, Zhdanov, or Laude all, to a certain extent, fall silent: they do not formulate their ontology, though it shows through in their practices. It is an ecdotic, philological-critical, and in a certain sense scientistic ontology: they see notation as disembodied text, as technical logos, as something an-anthropic (non-anthropic) and objective, to be deciphered, but not fully as poetic word, symbol, or space of sacrality. That other tradition, the one that conceives the score as an open sign, as the figure of something greater, I feel they largely exclude, whether they know it or not. And I believe that, at bottom, this is what matters most. Perhaps they would disagree with my assessment of their position; I cannot say.

 

    When certain discourses “declare”, with a certain tone of Mediterranean revelation ("discovering the Mediterranean", as we jokingly say in Spain) that a sign does not mean what we naively thought it meant, but something else, what they actually do is not emancipate the symbol, as they think they are doing, but perpetuate the trap. Why? Because by substituting one meaning for another, they still continue tacitly to maintain that every sign must mean one single, fixed, univocal thing. The problem is less semantic substitution than ontological presupposition: that symbols are containers with a predetermined content.

 

    But symbols do not work that way. They are traversed by historical, cultural, social, and even idiosyncratic strata. By nature they are multi-layered and polysemous; very, very porous. The symbol, like myth, is not exhausted by a single “correct meaning”; it is hermeneutic potency, not mere reference. To believe that interpretation consists in finding “the” true meaning of a given sign is, in a sense, to reduce exegesis to a pseudo-science. And here I would underscore: the interpretation of a text can never be a science, in the sense of predictive regularity, because the symbol operates not by deterministic laws but by resonances, displacements, associations, allegories. Asking “Where are your black shoes?” may be literal, but it may also be a metaphor of loss, an evocation of an absent one, irony, parody. The sign opens worlds; it does not close them.

     Now then, what does it philosophically mean to confuse map with territory? It is an ontological-level error. Ontologically, it reifies a means as though it were an end: it takes notation (a mediating instrument) for music itself (the realized reality). It inverts the order of knowing: it treats the map, which is schema and reduction, as if it possessed the fullness of the experience it describes. This generates an illusion of control and certainty: the belief that paper dictates the sonic in exhaustive detail. In reality, the map is never the territory because it crops, selects, stylizes.

 

    Philosophically, that error can be classified as a fallacy of improper identity (classic in our Western tradition) attributing absolute identity to two heterogeneous orders (sign and event, text and act). It is also a nominalist reduction, in which the sign is confused with the thing, as though the name exhausted the entity. At the same time, it is a kind of hermeneutic idolatry, for it absolutizes mediation (notation, text) while forgetting that it points to something larger: the lived sonorous experience, the interpreting body, the living tradition.

 

    That is why I insist: the performer who believes their mission is to “reflect” the score passively falls into the mirage of neutrality, which is impossible. There is no innocent mirror: there is always a gaze, flesh, history, affect. Music does not arise from reflection, but from the living event that the map only suggests. Hence the importance of recognizing that every musical ontology is implicit in practice: if you consider the score a territory, you will become a philologist; if you consider it a map, you will become a performer. And most current discourses, without acknowledging it, situate themselves at the first pole: philological-critical, scientistic ontologies, unable to see in notation a poetic, symbolic, open text.

 

    I suspect from your response that what I meant in my previous message may not have been fully understood, or that I was not clear enough. Perhaps you thought my criticism of the Laude video focused on the form of its argument, its commercial packaging, its resort to the spectacular, its appeal to feeling. And, truth be told, that matters far less to me. It’s true they appeal to emotions, and that does not surprise me: it is characteristic of our age to use emotion as a way of blocking, tacitly or explicitly, consciously or not, rational analysis. But my critique did not run along those lines. My critique is rather ontological: it targets the tacit presuppositions of their positions, what is taken for granted without ever being formulated, those silent implications that predetermine the way they conceive notation, music, and interpretation.

 

    And, in closing, I’d like to leave you with one last reflection, in which I summarize my position with something that, again, and I stress this, seems central to me: when they say “this sign does not mean this, but that,” they actually block what matters most. Because the point is not to substitute one meaning for another, as if there were a single sense waiting to be discovered beneath the patina of tradition. What is truly decisive is to recognize that signs can mean many things, and that their sense is not housed in some neutral, immutable essence, but in the living confrontation between subject and material. It is in that collision, in that interaction, that meaning emerges. To claim a “true meaning,” objective, an-anthropic, scientific, empirical, independent of that relation, is to maybe ignore that music does not exist outside the flesh, the voice, the consciousness, and the history of those who make it sound. There is no disembodied logos. Hence interpretation can never be reduced to science or to literalism: it is always act, encounter, and shared creation.

Sincerely,

Josu"

    I will now develop my claims a bit more here. So, the issue at stake is that, even while nuancing/complicating the picture (hairpins mean tempo, not dynamics), Denis Zhdanov, Ben Laude, Seymour Bernstein and, to a certain extent, also Roberto Poli, still seem to me (I might be wrong here) to operate under a sort of positivist assumption/framework that believes, tacitly or explicitly, that there exists one correct semantic value for each sign in a score.     Yes, they replace “crescendo” with “rubato” as if uncovering a secret law, but never question whether notation might be indeterminate, indexical, or polysemous.

    The tone suggests that through research, manuscripts, and scholarly “discoveries,” we can finally decode the score with precision. This creates the illusion of music as a decipherable code, reducible to correct answers, rather than an open, interpretive practice.

    Their arguments appeal to history as arbiter: Chopin’s intention, 1830s pianos, engraver’s plates. History is not contextualization here, but authority, the legitimizing ground for correctness.

    The performer becomes the executor of a corrected code, not a co-author of the musical event. Creativity is narrowed to applying “the right discovery” rather than engaging in living ambiguity.

    The Laude video, for instance, begins with a sort of mock-certainty (“water is wet, fire is hot, hairpin = crescendo”) only to substitute another certainty: hairpin = tempo fluctuation. The problem isn’t the claim itself, but the persistence of binary thinking: true/false, correct/incorrect. Correct/incorrect framing preserves the prescriptive ontology (notation as prescriptive). Even when pluralizing (“more subtle than that”), the video gravitates back to rule-substitution, not rule-relativization.

    Ben Laude starts by mocking naïve certainties, then installs a new certainty (“hairpins = timing/rubato”). This is a performative contradiction: anti-dogma via a new dogma.

    There is a strong, tacit, ontological compromise at work here: even when invoking living pianists like Seymour Bernstein, the discourse never abandons the prescriptive model (notation as prescriptive, and not descriptive). It still implies that the score encodes instructions, behavioural cues (“do this”) we must decode correctly. The score is thus not treated as an open map but as an encrypted law.

    

    There is also a slightly scientificist rhetoric. Talk of “irrefutable smoking guns,” “evidence,” “never redundant,” borrows from positivist science. This cloaks interpretation under the guise of discovery, as though the hairpin’s essence had been unearthed once and for all. It’s a kind positivistic evidentialism. Again, “smoking guns,” “irrefutable evidence,” early recordings: all this adopts scientific rhetoric to settle a hermeneutic question. The problem here is that interpretive evidence ≠ natural-kind proof.

    And to me, there is a tacit neglect of embodiment: there is no recognition that interpretation happens in the flesh, in presence, with risk, gesture, affect. The body is erased, replaced by proof-texts and decoded rules. The body of performance (risk, tactility, proprioception, local acoustics) is absent. To me, instead, meaning emerges in embodied enactment, not in abstract symbol decoding.

    They seem to perpetuate the same ontological trap: the belief that notation equals law, even when the “law” is redefined. They emancipate nothing, because they never step outside the prescriptive paradigm.

    I personally believe that notation is not prescriptive law but descriptive index, a map: porous, allegorical, symbolic. The Zhdanov and Laude discourses, at the end of the day, fall back on scientism, historicism, and literalism: they swap one fixed meaning for another but preserve the underlying assumption that there must be one.

    It seems to me that the real emancipation would be not in correcting what hairpins “really mean,” but in recognizing that they do not have one meaning. They are invitations, indices, gestures: signs whose sense is completed only in the interpretive act.

    To continue, one could make this kind of mental map of the situation:

The Laude-Poli-S. Bernstein-Laude claim: their tacit presuppositions

Semantic Monism (One-true-meaning thesis).

Tacit claim: there exists a correct semantic value for the hairpin (often “rubato/agogic time” rather than dynamics).

Ontological issue: this assumes notation=law rather than notation=index (open sign). It treats signs as containers with a determinate, extensional content.

Contradiction: the video repeatedly admits ambiguity (“sometimes impossible to say for sure”; editorial slippage; voice-assignment errors) while still promoting a general semantic reclassification. If the sign’s reference is historically and contextually underdetermined, monism is self-undercutting.

Methodological Intentionalism → Strong Authorialism.

Tacit claim: the composer’s (reconstructed) intention fixes the sign’s meaning.

Ontological issue: collapses the work into an authorial mental state recoverable by philology, through a kind of reverse/engineering. But works are socially realized practices (Goehr), not private intentions.

Contradiction: if engravers and editions routinely distort, the chain from intention → inscription → reading is broken; strong intentionalism loses its own evidential anchor.

Ecdotic Scientism (Decoding posture).

Tacit claim: with enough manuscript archaeology, we can finally decode the score.

Ontological issue: treats interpretation as discovery of a hidden natural kind; ignores the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer) and the constitutive role of practice.

Contradiction: to denounce “reliable editions” while proposing a new, global decoding is performatively inconsistent: the very archival fallibility adduced should lower, not raise, confidence in universal reassignments.

Historicism vs. Historicity.

Tacit claim: period facts (1830s instruments, pedal habits) normatively fix present performance.

Ontological issue: confuses historicity (situatedness and contingency) with historicism (past practice as prescriptive law).

Contradiction: advocating experimental “blur” (Chopin’s pedal) as obligatory today reinscribes the same prescriptive logic the thesis claims to transcend.

Category Error (Law/code vs. Gesture/index).

Tacit claim: the hairpin encodes a determinate instruction.

Ontological issue: semiotically, hairpins function as indexical operators on gesture (timing, inflection, voicing, energy), not as one-to-one symbol–referent pairings. Treating them as legal imperatives is a type error.

Reduction of Agency.

Tacit effect: performer becomes executor of a corrected code.

Ontological counterpoint: if music is event-realization, the performer is a co-author; a monistic decoding erodes the act’s ontological co-constitution.

Now, let us sketch a counter-ontology: 

arguments stated sharply

Ontology of the Work: Event, not Object.

To me, the work is realized in performance (event ontology), not exhausted by inscription. Argument: identity through family resemblance of enactments (Wittgenstein), not through perfect graphic replication.

Notation as Indexical/Descriptive Map.

To me, hairpins are indexical gesture operators (pointing to plausible families of realizations) rather than univocal commands. Argument: pervasive underdetermination plus historical variance implies open semantics.

Embodiment and Enactment.

To me, meaning is co-constituted in the sensorimotor act (Merleau-Ponty, enactivism). A sign’s “sense” is completed by bodily technique, situational affordances, and audience horizon.

Hermeneutic Pluralism with Normative Constraints.

To me, plurality isn’t an “anything goes.” Constraints arise from style, instrument, venue, tradition, pedagogy/soft normativity vs hard prescription. Argument: predictive regularity is inappropriate; phronesis (practical wisdom) applies.

Anti-Historicism, Pro-Historicity.

To me, history informs affordances; it does not legislate them. Argument: descriptive evidence (what some did) ≠ prescriptive law (what all must do).

Semiotic Multiplicity.

To me, hairpin semantics = {dynamic swell, temporal hesitation, voice highlighting, color shift, phrase arch, registral balancing}. No single reading dominates across corpora. Argument from polysemy and context-sensitivity.

Key contradictions to surface explicitly in their discourse:

1. “We can’t trust editions” → “Here is the correct global reassignment.” The evidential skepticism defeats the universality claim.

2. “Sometimes indeterminate” → “But hairpins mean X.” Indeterminacy and monism are incompatible.

3. “Against dogma” → “New rule installed.” Anti-dogmatic rhetoric with dogmatic structure.

4. “Historically informed” → “Historically binding.” Description smuggled in as prescription.

5. “Performance matters” (rhetoric) → “Score decoding matters” (practice). Embodiment is named, then displaced by code.

    The debate here, thus, is not really between crescendo vs rubato semantics; it is between semantic monism (any single, privileged mapping from sign to sound/time) and indexical pluralism (hairpins as operators over a space of historically conditioned, pragmatically selected gestures).

    I personally reject monism and law-prescription in favor of event-realization with soft constraints, embodied phronesis, and semiotic openness. That stance both explains the data (historical variability, editorial noise, divergent practices) and preserves the creative agency that actually makes music music.

    The real question, then, is not whether hairpins mean crescendo or rubato, but whether we understand notation as law or as map. To choose the first is to reduce music to archival object (an antiquity, collector's item); to choose the second is to affirm music as event, act, encounter, shared creation. It is in that gap, between rule and presence, that music seems to be to come alive.

    What is at stake is thus not the semantics of a single sign but the ontology of notation itself. The positivist ontology promises certainty, codification, control; but it impoverishes interpretation, confuses map with territory, and transforms performers into scribes, neutral transmitters, etc. 

    On the other hand, the more indexical/symbolic ontology accepts ambiguity, risk, and the porousness of symbols; but it grounds interpretation in the flesh of the gesture, the historicity of practice, and the responsibility of the performer as co-author of the event.

    

    Thus the true battlefield is not between crescendo and rubato, but between ontology-as-law and ontology-as-map. In that difference, I think, lies the future of performance.

    Now, if I have argued that the score must be conceived not as law but as map, it is now necessary to deepen that metaphor by invoking Gustavo Bueno’s remarkable thesis in his now legendary essay El mapa como institución de lo imposible (unfortunately only available in Spanish, online). For Bueno, a map is not only a technical artefact or a univocal instrument of representation; it is also, in its philosophical extension, an analogical figure (the importance of analogy here cannot be understated) that points toward the attempt to chart what exceeds representation, to domesticate the impossible. This dialectic between the univocal (the cartographic graph) and the analogical (the philosophical idea of map) offers a framework that illuminates the debate on musical notation.

    If the positivist interpreters treat the score as a juridical law, they reduce it to what Bueno would call the univocal, technological concept of map: a diagram that stands in a one-to-one, supposedly biunivocal, relation with the field it depicts. Yet as Bueno demonstrates, maps rarely sustain such purity: they overflow their own univocity, becoming analogical, porous, multipurpose. 

    The same occurs in music: notation cannot be reduced to a transparent code because its marks, like cartographic points, are always underdetermined, selective, open to plural codomains. A crescendo hairpin, like a contour on a topographic map, does not command a single route; it indicates a terrain to be traversed, whose realization depends on the operator, the demiurge of interpretation.

    Bueno insists that a map is never an abstract reflection; it is always a pragmatic tool/institution, a tool of orientation (a compass) embedded in collective practices. Its truth lies not in mimetic adequacy but in its ability to guide itineraries, to eliminate randomness in movement. 

    By analogy, the score does not mirror the music; it orients gestures, frames possibilities, enables traversal. The performer is not a neutral mirror but the navigating subject who uses the notational map to re-enter the sonic field, adjusting, correcting, and even erring, as sailors did with Columbus’s maps or as astronomers did with Ptolemaic skies. The authority of the score is thus pragmatic, not juridical.

    From this vantage, the prescriptive ontology collapses. To conceive notation as law is to imagine a map that already contains the terrain in its fullness, a map that abolishes the very need for navigation. But Bueno reminds us that the very idea of a mapamundi is an impossibility, an absurd project of “fitting the cosmos into a handkerchief.” Likewise, the idea that each sign in a score has one unique semantic content is the musical equivalent of believing that a map could contain the world in absolute adequation. It is an ontological mirage: to confuse the graphos with the codomain (phonos), the trace with the reality it mediates.

    The dialectical richness of Bueno’s idea lies precisely in showing that every map is simultaneously a selection and a distortion. It never contains the infinite points of the field; it schematizes, stylizes, and therefore omits. The omission is not a defect but the condition of possibility of orientation. In the same way, notation is powerful precisely because it does not prescribe exhaustively: it leaves room for embodiment, for the demiurgic subject who reads, imagines, and realizes. To demand exhaustive prescriptivity is to kill the map by confusing it with the terrain.

    Bueno also emphasizes that maps are institutions, supra-individual structures that embed collective norms and afford substitution among operators. A nautical chart only functions if many pilots can use it, correcting and adjusting its indications. Similarly, notation is institutional: a performer inherits signs whose force derives not from private intention but from collective practices of reading, pedagogy, and tradition. This institutional dimension dissolves the illusion of authorial intentionalism: Chopin’s private mental state does not fix the meaning of the hairpin, just as Anaximander’s thought does not delimit all future uses of the map. The sign lives in the institution, not in the psyche.

    Seen from Bueno’s lens, then, the positivist musicologists and pedagogues commit what we might call the fallacy of the mapa unívoco (univocal map). They imagine notation as if it were one of those maps that aspire to be self-contained, closed, exhaustive. But every real map, like every real musical score, is analogical, linked to multiple fields, capable of serving distinct itineraries, always mediated by the praxis of the demiurge. The performer is this demiurge, not a passive executor but the one who enacts the relation between graphos and the terrain. To deny this role is to mutilate the ontological status of both map and music.

    Furthermore, Bueno’s dialectic of concave and convex perspectives, that is, between a world seen from outside (convex, Pantocrator-like) and one seen from within (concave, anthropological), offers a striking metaphor for musical ontology. The prescriptive view is convex: it imagines the score from outside, as if from a divine vantage point where each sign has its fixed, external meaning. The descriptive, indexical view is concave: it situates interpretation from within the world, from the embodied position of those who must navigate it. The former is metaphysical illusion; the latter is the real condition of music as event.

    This connection allows us to sharpen the critique of positivism. The Laude or Zhdanov discourses do not merely misinterpret hairpins; they enact a metaphysical error akin to the belief in a true mapamundi. They confuse description with law, orientation with prescription. They ignore that music, like the world, cannot be captured exhaustively in a diagram. At best, the diagram enables us to move, to risk, to traverse. A score is not a command but an invitation to orientation: an institution of the impossible, as Bueno aptly called maps. 

    The ultimate lesson of Bueno’s philosophy of the map is that maps live in the tension between impossibility and necessity. They attempt the impossible (total representation) but succeed pragmatically by enabling finite, situated itineraries. In this lies their paradoxical power. The same is true of notation: it gestures toward the impossible totality of a musical work but functions only by guiding the concrete praxis of interpreters. To deny this paradox is to misunderstand both map and score. To embrace it is to affirm music as act, as journey, as shared creation in the face of impossibility.

    Thus the analogy with Bueno confirms my thesis: notation must be conceived not as law but as map, not as closed code but as open institution. To read the score is to chart the impossible, to orient oneself in a terrain that no map can exhaust. And in this orientation, the performer is not a mere executor but a demiurge, a navigator, a co-author of the event. The score, like the map, is only alive in the hands of those who risk themselves in its traversal.

SUMMARY/

RECAPITULATION: 

    The recent videos by Denis Zhdanov and by Laude, both appealing to Roberto Poli’s research, are presented as revelations: what we thought the hairpin meant in musical notation was wrong, and here at last is the “truth.” Yet beneath the surface of musicological curiosity lies something more consequential: a tacit ontology, an unexamined set of metaphysical commitments about what music is, what notation is, and what interpretation means. These commitments, unspoken but decisive, orient the entire discussion and delimit the possible conclusions.

    Zhdanov, following Poli, builds his case around the idea that the hairpin does not primarily indicate crescendo and diminuendo, but rather agogic inflection, rubato, or voice-highlighting. The implicit claim here is not simply semantic but ontological: that there exists a determinate, correct meaning of the sign, recoverable through manuscript archaeology and authorial intention. This is a form of semantic monism, the thesis that every sign in the score has one true referent, one true prescription. The effect is a reduction of the performer’s agency to the work of compliance with the corrected code.

    But here contradictions arise. The very discourse that denounces the unreliability of engravers and editors, and that admits that some signs are undecidable in context, simultaneously insists on global reassignments of meaning. If the evidence is radically unstable, the possibility of a single universal decoding collapses. One cannot both proclaim the fallibility of transmission and sustain monism of meaning. Similarly, the rhetoric of liberation, “we have been reading the score wrong for one hundred years”, secretly installs a new dogma: “this is what the score really means.” Anti-dogmatic discourse produces a fresh dogmatism.

    At stake here is also a deeper methodological decision: to treat the identity of the musical work as exhausted by the notated object, with the score serving as juridical law. This is the ontology of notation-as-law: stave, rubric, and dynamic marking function as imperatives, as commands to be executed. The performer’s role is that of a faithful executor, and the composer’s intention, reconstructed by philological methods, serves as arbiter of truth. Yet this stands in tension with the admitted ambiguities and contradictions of the sources. It is an ontology that clings to the idea of the score as a perfect code, even as it narrates its imperfections.

    The Laude video follows a similar path. It begins by mocking the naïve certainty of “everyone knows a hairpin means crescendo,” only to replace that certainty with another: “hairpins mean rubato.” This irony is not innocent: it is a performative contradiction. Beneath the jokes and the appeals to authority (Wikipedia, dictionaries, Harvard definitions) lies the same positivist hope: that through sufficient accumulation of evidence (early recordings, testimonies, editions) we may fix, once and for all, the true semantics of the hairpin. The rhetoric of “smoking gun,” “irrefutable evidence,” “scholarly proof” belongs to the register of natural science, not to hermeneutics. Yet interpretation is not natural science, and signs are not natural kinds.

    What both discourses share, then, is a positivist and historicist ontology. Positivist, because they assume that signs are objects with recoverable essences, awaiting scientific decoding. Historicist, because they imagine that the practices of the nineteenth century prescribe for us what these signs must mean today. In both cases, history is transformed from a field of situated practices into a tribunal of law, whose verdicts bind present interpretation. Description is surreptitiously converted into prescription.

    The result is a reduction of interpretive agency. The performer, rather than a co-author of the event, becomes an executor of rules; the score is not map but law; interpretation is obedience, not risk. The hermeneutic richness of ambiguity is flattened into univocity. And when ambiguity is admitted, it is cast as a problem to be solved, not as a constitutive feature of notation’s openness.

    Against this ontology I would propose another, rooted in semiotics, hermeneutics, and performance theory. Notation, I argue, is not primarily prescriptive but descriptive, indexical, interpretive. Its marks point toward families of possible gestures, habits, micro-traditions, ways of acting. A trill in an eighteenth-century manuscript is not a recipe to be followed slavishly; it is an index of a practice, a cue that can only be completed in the act of performance by a situated body, in dialogue with instrument, acoustics, and audience. A hairpin is not a command but a gesture-marker: it may suggest dynamic swelling, temporal hesitation, voice prominence, registral shaping, or a combination thereof. The relation between graphos and phonos is not logical and univocal, but probabilistic, historical, pragmatic.

    This is the ontology of notation-as-map. A map is not the territory; it is a selective, stylized trace, a tool of orientation. To confuse map and territory, as Borges allegorized, is to commit a fundamental ontological error: to reify the medium of mediation as the substance itself. The score is not the music; music happens in the event, in the embodied act of performance. The interpreter is not a neutral mirror (which does not exist), but an incarnate consciousness that completes the sign in sound.

    From this standpoint, the pluralism of interpretation is not a weakness but a truth. Symbols are porous, stratified, historically layered; they never mean one thing only. To imagine otherwise is to confuse hermeneutics with science, to reduce interpretation to pseudo-science. Asking what a sign “really” means is less fruitful than asking how it can be realized, what families of enactments it points to, and how these can be situated within style, history, and presence.

CODA 

(A Borges parable)

Jorge Luis Borges

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.

The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Chapter XLV, Lérida, 1658.

END