Is There a Data Model in Music Notation?

Scores are structured objects, and we can therefore envisage operations that change the structure of a score, combine several scores, and produce new score instances from some pre-existing material. Current score encodings, however, are designed for rendering and exchange purposes, and cannot directly be exploited as instances of a clear data model supporting algebraic manipulations. We propose an approach that leverages a music content model hidden in score notation, and define a set of composable operations to derive new "scores" from a corpus of existing ones. We show that this approach supplies a high-level tool to express common, useful applications, can easily be implemented on top of standard components, and finally gives rise to interesting conceptual issues related to the modeling of music notation