Tactile Paths

Chapter 0: The Ground
The word tactile, meaning literally “of or connected with the sense of touch”, shifts the emphasis off the visual aspect of notation – the score as object – and onto its use – what performers and composers (can) do with it in the context of realtime music-making. The metaphor of the path encompasses three overlapping identities of notation for improvisers: maps (printed scores), thoroughfares (invitations to collaborate), and trails (indexes of practice).

Seeing the Full Sounding
Malcolm Goldstein. How do the physical qualities of my reading, his writing, and our imaginations interact in and through performance? What role do these interactions play in the experience of listening and viewing?

A Treatise Remix Handbook
Through all of this Cardew's professed hope was “that in playing this piece, each musician will give of his own music. He will give it as his response to my music, which is the score itself.” A noble intention, this communion, but how has it worked in practice, if at all?

Say No Score: a Lexical Improvisation after Bob Ostertag
Performances nested in recordings nested in scores played in performance, the whole of which (re)constitutes the environment in and over time. Rather than a static documentation – “the digital freezing of performative flow” (Peters 2014, 9-10) – the “record kept” here is an intractable knot within a knot, an inherently dynamic performative tool.

Entextualization and Preparation in Patterson’s Variations for Double-Bass
Seen in this light, the layers upon layers of editorial chaos I described above do not represent refinements or repairs to a completed work that should be untangled by the performer. Instead, they show a continually fresh re-tracing of germinal ideas over time....

Invitation to Collaborate — Répondez s’il vous plaît!
Richard Barrett and Lawrence Halprin. Score + Response = Collaboration = Liberation?

Chapter Ω
Despite the fact that the dissertation does not have a linear internal structure, the reader's own path on and through it is bound to end at some point; thus it seems both fair and potentially profitable to work with linear experience here rather than ignore it, and "find an ending", as they say.