The Folded Map is a project about Renaissance polyphony. And yet it’s also about philosophy, art and science. It’s the claim that polyphonic music is part of the world, part of knowledge and part of what has shaped modern life.

Throughout the development of measured notation, polyphony and encrypted music, a persistent gap between: record and interpretation; theory and practice; and meaning and representation remains in tact. Seeing and hearing are pitted against each other: two irreconcilable experiences of the supposedly cohesive ‘work’.

And yet, almost surprisingly, the colourful canon of Western Polyphony here admits the failure of its own ambitions; efforts to capture, preserve and revive, walk hand in hand with destruction and obfuscation. Corruption meets generation. Written music of this sort continually reveals itself as conceptual art, commenting upon the conditions of its own creation and perilous reception. It’s a picture pretending to be a pipe.

The Folded Map is about the meanings we construct and curate. With a map we can navigate, evade cul-de-sacs and hunt for treasure. And so it captures not the terrain as such, but our attempts to parse it. In Renaissance music I should hear the discourse on representation. I should hear the Copernican revolution. Beholding polyphony in the age of perspective means placing these objects of study amidst a “paradigm shift”, one that upended what we thought was knowable, how to know it, and how to show it.