Is the score dead?

The composer Peter Wiegold recently came to the institution where I teach, Sussex University. He was talking on the subject of collaboration in music in a research seminar series I'm organising; and his particular concern is collaboration between musicians in performing contexts, and the means by which new musical forms of expression are achieved. He doesn't think the score is dead: unlike the policy-makers for schools' teaching of music, for whom I gather 'relevant' music is pop, he thinks there is a role for the score as a starting point. But he argues that the score only takes us back to Monteverdi, and that the players most highly esteemed for centuries were those capable of departing from the text. Peter Wiegold's projects with his own band notes inegales demonstrate the richness of this approach. Starting from a strong core, or centre, their collective compositions spin out into realms of unimagined beauty, using techniques of extrapolation and decoration, as though the ensemble itself is one unified but incredibly rich creative brain. I found Peter's talk suggestive and exciting. But for me the peculiar western invention, or myth, of the score, remains intriguing and attractive. I see it as the means by which a polyphonic conception of music, both ordered and complex, is generated and sustained. The particular achievement of notated western music is sustained, coherent and elaborate invention, capable of detaching itself from the known (the strong centre) and attaining the infinite. It is the act of writing, of martialing and projecting musical thought in time and space, which gives us Tallis's Spem in Alium, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Varese's Hyperprism, Bartok's Fourth Quartet, Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre. In this sense, perhaps, the composer's script is analogous in function to the playwright's script, to Shakespeare's, Joyce's, Beckett's...