ABSTRACT
A piece of music consists of an extended sequence of actions involving a number of agents. Within those musical cultures that employ written symbols—as most do, in one way or another—notation specifies these actions, whether directly or indirectly. The positive way to make the point is that, far from being deficiencies, the gaps in the notation represent opportunities for creative interpretation and interaction between performers. And the reason musicians go on listening to “the same” music is that, in performance, it isn’t the same at all: every performance combines the security of the familiar with the shock of the new, or if not that, then at least the sense that people never know exactly what is going to happen until it has happened. In short, it is the gaps in the notation—its symbolic poverty—that give it its value as a way of specifying the series of social actions and interactions of which any performance consists.
