The Score Is Not the Music
Reading Trask (Penguin Guide to Puctuation) on a flight today, I found myself disagreeing with him. Substantially.
Not because he's careless with it. Quite the opposite. His punctuation is disciplined, systematic, almost instructional. He treats it as a framework through which thought is organised and communicated.
I realised that I approach it differently. For me, punctuation has never felt like a set of rules imposed upon language. It feels more like part of the act of expression itself. A comma is not a traffic sign. A dash is not a regulation. A full stop is not an instruction.
They are closer to the traces left by a thought in motion.
When I write, punctuation feels less like the Highway Code and more like the controls of a motorcycle. Not because it governs the journey, but because it becomes part of the journey. Rider and machine gradually disappear into a single act of movement. The controls cease to be separate things. They become extensions of perception.
The same is true of a painter's brush. The brushstroke is not there to organize the painting. It is evidence of the painting being made. And then, because I have spent so much time recently thinking about my next series of articles on music, it occurred to me that the distinction might be even clearer there.
A score is not music.
A score is an extraordinary achievement. It captures relationships, structures, timings, possibilities. But it does not contain music any more than a map contains a landscape.
Music happens when a performer inhabits those symbols.
Two musicians can play identical notes from the same score and produce entirely different experiences. What changes is not the notation but the performance. Perhaps writing contains a similar tension. Grammar, punctuation, and style guides are forms of notation. They help us record, preserve, and share expression. But they are not the expression itself.
The mistake comes when we confuse one for the other.
The score matters: The performance matters more.
[Trask, I suspect, would disapproved of the colon there, and most defitely of my use of this:– ] (square bracket).
Perhaps that is why I sometimes find myself resisting systems that seek to make writing simpler by turning it into rules. Simplicity can emerge in another way through practice. Not the practise of grammar rules, but the practise of the expression of ones own thought. Not through codification, but through feel.
A motorcyclist does not become graceful by memorising the Highway Code. A musician does not become expressive by memorising notation. A writer does not become eloquent by memorising punctuation rules. Those things matter. But they belong to a different realm.
They are the score: The living thing begins when someone starts to play.
David Marshall
Montory