EXTRACT

There is a debate in the world of classical music, which is stored primarily in scores but now endlessly recorded, between proponents of historically faithful performance, and those of contemporary re-imagining. Which side I would be on is probably clear, but my interest is elsewhere, in something about the difference between recordings and scores themselves, and how they might help us think about the ways ideas and artefacts within the world of architecture are circulated. Bach’s music was created in a specific space and time, and one way to circulate it now is through recordings that attempt to recreate as faithfully as possible the space-time of its conception, so we can hear it as a perfect artefact unchanged since its composition. Alternatively, we can circulate this music through scores, and learn to recreate them in times and places with different politics, acoustics, technologies and cultures, allowing it to be transformed in the process.

Being realised in performance, the score becomes a meeting point between the situated practice of performers in place, and the mobile media of music written down. Borrowing a phrase from Keller Easterling’s work on the ‘power of infrastructure space’, a score is knowing to – a guide for making music conceived by a composer, and used by a performer as knowledge, encoded in media, which with to do something that makes sense in their own context. A recording, I would argue, is similar to an urtext (historically accurate) performance in attempting to achieve and then freeze a certain truth. This is what Easterling calls knowing that – in this case knowing that a piece of music must be a certain way, and that the only job of performance is to get there.

The reason I think the score is illuminating, is because it works somewhere between pure universality and pure contextualism – not quite half way on a spectrum between the two (that would be boring) but rather a mix of the best of both. The score starts as pure contextualism – it is an idea, born of an individual, constrained to a greater or lesser degree by the culture they are composing within, perhaps to a commission for certain instrumentalists even. Later, though, it can start to act with a degree of universality – whether by appropriation or violent imposition – circulating globally simply as a suggested set of notes to play, for instrumentalists anywhere to do what they want with. But the score as a medium for communicating a musical idea always carries something of the context it is written in, and is always interpreted with context too. Its universality becomes the possibility of a meeting between contexts, or the translation of one person’s idea through the knowledge of the hands of another (for instrumentalists are manual knowers par excellence, with habitual and idiosyncratic ways of doing rhythm and expression, which are derived from their particular musical training, ingrained in their muscle memories).

I think there is a similar issue in city-making. Forms of architecture and urban design that have been deemed successful, usually in Western Europe and North America, have often been exported to other places as attempted replicas under the auspices of ‘best practice’ and progress. What gets exported, though, is the performance, not the score: a replica of the finished artefact rather than a knowledge base on which to build something new. In this metaphor, I understand the performance and its audience to be analogous with built space and the experience of using it – all the phenomena that arise in the interacting patterns of the space itself, and the practices, rhythms, desires, conflicts of its users. The material and visual culture of a space is one aspect of the performance – not just the architect’s choice of built shapes and finishes but the signs and produce displayed in shop windows, the clothes people wear, the furniture placed outside cafés, the graffiti and flyers for gigs or political causes pasted to walls. If a building is performed differently by its users than its designers had intended, is it a bit like a score?

Modernist architects in the 1960s and 1970s thought they had rationalised urban planning, seeing cities as mechanical systems whose parts could be neatly arranged, with blocks for living, blocks for shopping, roads for cars and pedestrian walkways neatly separated above. Their intentions were good – to make sanitary the slum-like conditions of many inner cities at the time. They aimed to provide housing with light, air, and inside toilets, whilst ‘freeing’ people to use motorcars to move around. In London, the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle is a classic example, replacing a network of old terraced streets with high-rise blocks in open green spaces, and a shopping centre raised up and cut off from the street, accessed by car from a large pair of roundabouts. By the 1980s, many considered the ‘modernist experiment’ failed and Conservative politicians abandoned its often state-owned buildings to semi-ruin, along with the communities living in them. Mainstream urban thinking – whether in universities or commercial practices – played into this narrative, branding them ‘bad urbanism’ thanks to their supposed inflexibility and unfriendliness to creative use and informal interactions – and advocated for demolition and redevelopment. This has been the fate of the Heygate Estate. But Elephant’s shopping centre still survives (for now at least), and shows a different model. Its historically-accurate performance as a destination shopping mall accessed by car no longer being relevant, it was re-interpreted by a new set of performers: Latin American immigrants settling particularly in south London. Business-owners from these communities treated its internal layout as a framework, made slight alterations, re-thought the function of its elements, established cafés and beauty salons inside, re-configured shop fronts. Later, market stalls were created on its previously blank street edges, particularly by later West African immigrants. They gave it new life, but also translated it via a new set of material cultures, like Bach revived by being played on contemporary instruments. Perhaps what a Bach score and Elephant and Castle’s shopping centre share in common is that for both of them enough distance has opened up between the space-time of their design and their discovery by new performers, who are less concerned with what they are ‘supposed’ to be than what they make possible now. They appear to us less as an artefact – the work of someone’s hand – than a tool to be manipulated.