“You know, there are all kinds of maps. There are maps that don’t show any small towns between the big cities, and then there are military maps that tell you everything within a fifteen-meter radius. Really, all kinds of maps. A score is a map, not a scenario.”
Morton Feldman, Masterclass (4 July 1986)
Morton Feldman suggested that a musical score can be seen not just as instructions for performance, but as an independent object with its own spatial and visual logic. Like a map, a score represents something that exists in another dimension—sound or time—through symbols arranged on a plane. Both maps and scores abstract reality: a map reduces complex geography to lines, contours, and symbols, while a score reduces music to notes, rhythms, and dynamics. Importantly, neither fully contains the experience itself; the performer interprets the score just as a traveler interprets a map, navigating the possibilities embedded in its structure. Feldman’s comparison emphasizes the score as a material, visual object in space, one that invites exploration and contemplation, not just reproduction, echoing his broader interest in music as an art of duration, texture, and subtlety.
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