Lost and Not Lost

I don't have a proper tag for this! I just ran across a fascinating article on the loss and preservation of ancient literature. The author dismisses the story that it was Christians who were responsible for the burning of ancient pagan libraries and instead finds a lot of evidence that the survival of much ancient literature was due to the Christians. I ran across a number of interesting facts that I was not aware of:

• It has been claimed that about ten million words of classical Greek and one million words of classical Latin, excepting Christian works, have come down to us. Of the former, two million words are the medical corpus of Galen alone, while of the later about a third is made up of the surviving three quarters of the works of Cicero. In fact, whereas much classical Greek is technical and not of interest to the general reader, nearly all preserved classical Latin is worth reading in its own right.
• So just what proportion of ancient literature has been lost? This is difficult to answer but we can get a rough estimate from the size of ancient libraries. Archaeology suggests that the biggest contained 20,000 or so scrolls and the Great Library of Alexandria itself is most reliably said to have contained 40,000. On the other hand, all the extant pagan classical works would not fill much more than a thousand scrolls so we have been left with about 5% of what might be found (barring repeat copies) in Rome. As for Latin, we have the names of 772 classical authors.  Of these, not a word survives from 276 of them.  We have fragments ranching from an aphorism to several pages of 352 of the authors.  Of the remaining 144, we possess at least one of their works but rarely all of them.

Wow! I had no idea that Greek literature amounted to so much more than Latin. Nor that the level differed so much, the Greek being much more technical and the Latin more popular. 95% lost.

• Some of the reasons that important literature disappeared are in fact very prosaic. The most important was language. When the Roman Empire was at its height the educated classes could read both Latin and Greek but after the fourth century the two languages split on geographical grounds with Greek completely dying out in Western Europe. In the East, Latin was first confined to the army and then disappeared altogether. As late as the thirteenth century the humanist scholar Petrarch could bemoan in a letter to Nicolas Sygeros that he was unable to read any of his collection of Greek manuscripts. Clearly, copying a manuscript that no one understands is not going to be a priority so Latin in the East and Greek in the West was lost.
• This is also the reason for the near total lack of scientific scholarship in Western Europe before the translations into Latin of the High Middle Ages. There never was a scientific tradition in Latin, only popular writings like Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Once Greek died out, these were all that anyone could read and the technical Greek works (apart from one or two like Plato's Timeaus that had already been translated into Latin) were lost to the West.

Again, wow. No scientific tradition in Latin. For some reason this never dawned on me, I suppose because I tend to read much more in Greek authors than Latin ones. Now that I think of it, the Latin authors are poets, biographers, historians and not writers on science. How odd!

• Today we regret how much has been lost but we have been remarkably careless ourselves. Many classic television serials, such as Doctor Who from the 1960s, have disappeared because at the time no one felt they were important enough to use up video tape for. Even more tragically, large numbers of early movies like the second part of the incomparable Wedding March (1928) have been lost through carelessness and the perishability of nitrate film (for further details see here). Some surviving classics were preserved in a single print. To those of us who mourn the loss of classical literature this is a depressingly familiar story.

Yes, and the recent fire at the Universal archive in which a lot of master tapes of popular music were lost shows that the problem is ongoing. I preserved some files on zip drives that I no longer have any means of reading, for example.

Just as a footnote to the nature of preserved Greek literature: we have a number of texts on Greek music theory by people like Aristoxenus, but almost no actual music. The Greeks lacked a good system of music notation, but they were very interested in the theory of music and that had a significant influence on the later development of Arabic and Western European notions of music theory. I was very amused to read in the introduction to Gustave Reese's book Music in the Middle Ages with an Introduction on the Music of Ancient Times (published 1940 and one of the first books in English on the topic) that when he consulted a classical scholar about ancient Greek music theory he was told to avoid it completely as "that way lies madness!"

Still reading Arthur Rubinstein's autobiography and he just mentioned Stravinsky's Piano Rag Music, the first piece of any importance he wrote for piano and which was dedicated to Rubinstein:

Rubinstein couldn't make much sense of it and didn't play it much. Last night I listened to the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra playing the 1947 Petrushka ballet score by Stravinsky. Excellent performance conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada and excellent quality:

Every time I hear that I am astonished at how good the music is.

Pre-Literate, Literate and Post-Literate Music

There has been a lot of discussion, some of it on this blog, about how one defines 'classical' music. Greg Sandow, in his discussions of the future of classical music, deals with it on occasion here. I have tried to define it as music that has enough quality to make it worth listening to long after it was composed. So I would define both Gregorian chant and the Beatles as 'classical' music. But after reading Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music I have come to the conclusion that this may be too inflected by the ideological framework of the 19th century, when this very idea was used to construct a classical repertoire based on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven with later composers added as they pushed themselves into the repertoire. The large institutions of classical music were founded and are still based largely on this principle.

Taruskin offers an alternative: music had an oral pre-history; that music that preceded the development of notation (such as the chant we have been discussing lately). Oral, that is non-notation based, music has continued to exist alongside notated, or literate music, ever since. Recently, with the growth of non-notated popular music as a huge presence, we seem to be moving into a post-literate stage. Paul McCartney, the richest composer/performer in all of music history, claims to have never learned to read music. This was partly made possible by the development of sophisticated recording technology. The Beatles composed in the studio with the aid of sound technology.

My own career in music reflects these shifts. My mother was a folk musician who did not read music, who played "by ear". For the first three or four years I did the same. But when I discovered classical music, I converted myself from a pre-literate musician into a literate one. I was moving in the wrong direction, of course, as viewed in retrospect, the musical world was moving in the opposite direction!

This has been rather abstract, so let me offer some examples. Here is some pre-literate music. First the African mbira or thumb piano, from Zimbabwe:

Haec Dies an Easter gradual that was probably 'composed' before notation was developed:

A tune by the Beatles that was partly composed at the guitar, lyrics written on a napkin, and finished in the studio. When 'literate' musicians were invited in to play solos, such as perhaps the flute-player here, George Martin stepped in to write out the parts.

Literate music often made use of the style of pre-literate music such as this Occitan dance-song from the 12th century. The notation used for this was the same as for chant, i.e. rhythms not clearly specified so everything you hear in this arrangement that is rhythmic, such as the percussion and the note-values, was added by the performers:

I'm sure you are very familiar with examples of 'literate' music, but here are a couple just as reminders. First, a Haydn quartet movement influenced by pre-literate gypsy music:

The great symphonic works of the 19th century would not have been possible without the resources of notation:

Music literacy leads to the possibility of much greater complexity, that is not possible if everyone is playing by ear such as in this composition by Berio that quotes from many sources including a Mahler symphonic movement:

Alongside the 'literate' music, the non-literate or oral tradition, was still always present. Jazz musicians occupy a kind of middle ground in that they are nearly all literate musicians, but a great deal of what they play is, intentionally, not written down:

Right now, there are so many technological resources, such as synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers and digital recording, that the ability to write down music seems to many to be of very little use. Plus, the notation we have is poorly adapted to record the kind of music that is now possible. Here is an electronic piece by Stockhausen using both synthesized and recorded sounds:

In my own composition I suppose I am an anachronism as I write everything down, or try to!

Daring to be Critical

Anne Midgette, classical music critic for the Washington Post (and married to Greg Sandow) has an article up about music criticism that is worth reading. She is reacting to the uncritical kind of reception classical music often receives from people who have no real expertise in the area. Read the whole thing. Here is one paragraph:

Time and again, artists and thinkers who are sophisticated observers of their own fields step back and goggle when they see classical artists at work. I often cite a Shakespeare concert presided over by Adrian Noble, the acclaimed stage director who was just about to make his Metropolitan Opera debut with Verdi’s setting of “Macbeth;” a few weeks before the show, the Met co-presented a performance that juxtaposed readings of Shakespearean monologues with singing of Shakespeare-based opera arias. Noble spoke between the pieces: he had acute insights about the spoken monologues, but after the opera selections he was reduced to the equivalent of, “Wasn’t that great.” 

These are undoubtedly accurate observations. Midgette seems reluctant to state the underlying assumptions, though. Isn't the fundamental one that if you want to speak intelligently about an art form, you need two kinds of expertise: first in critical thinking generally and second, about the materials and methods used in the particular art form? One of the brakes on good criticism in music is probably the fact that the consumers of criticism are no longer well-educated in music. Time was when most books written on music for the general public were stuffed full of examples from the score that you could play over on the piano. An example: The Wagner Operas by Ernest Newman, first published in 1949 and still in print. But books aimed at the general public are now cleansed of any trace of music notation--even ones that purport to be in-depth discussions of specific repertoire. An example: Shostakovich: Symphonies and Concertos, An Owner's Manual by David Hurwitz, published in 2006. The result is that all discussion, even about detailed events in individual movements as in the Hurwitz book, is reduced to description through metaphor:

Brittle trills on woodwinds and xylophone, topped by suspended cymbal crashes, launch the initial strident march, blasted out by the brass against a stubborn repeated-note accompaniment. The music is deliberately crude and rises quickly to a huge climax with assistance from the bass drum and tam-tam, with high horns and whiplike chords on brass and woodwinds. A contrasting, more lyrical idea follows in the strings, interspersed by bits of march: repeated-note figures, soft snare-drum riffs, and fragments of brass fanfares...

I put up enough of the description to give a real sense of it. Now, what piece by Shostakovich is he talking about? Any idea? Trills in woodwinds, marches, repeated notes and so on are fairly frequently occurring elements in a Shostakovich score. Now how about this:

Click to enlarge

With only a bare minimum of musical literacy you can probably identify this theme by poking it out, with one finger, on the piano. I don't even have the score to copy from so I created this musical example just by listening to a bit of the recording to be sure what note it started on. This is the passacaglia theme from the first movement of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony. Hurwitz is talking about the first movement of Shostakovich's 4th Symphony on page 63 of his book. I suspect only many, many hours of research and listening would enable you to identify the piece from that description.

The perception is that music notation is very difficult--and there are certainly lots of very difficult to read scores around. But basic literacy in music is really not hard. My students are reading music from the first lesson. Compare to studying French. The best French course I ever had was taught in the same way: everyone was speaking nothing but French from the first class. When we consider the costs of helping a population become literate, it is always useful to consider the considerably greater costs of them remaining illiterate! But literacy in music is not only undervalued, it now seems to be regarded as an extremely esoteric skill like dowsing or reading Ancient Greek. There are reasons for this, of course. One is that a great deal of music has always been non-literate, improvised. Some of this is very fine music indeed. Another is that we seem, since the 60s, to be moving into a post-literate musical culture. When Paul McCartney can become the richest musician in history without learning to read a note, what good is musical literacy? Not much to him!

But when we talk about music, as either musicians, or music lovers or music critics, musical literacy is hugely useful. Go back to my two examples above. In over 80 words, Hurwitz can only give a description so vague that even someone intimately familiar with the symphonies of Shostakovich would be hard-pressed to know which one he was talking about. Each of these words in turn, is composed of several different symbols. On the other hand, the musical notation, clearly and simply, precisely identifies one and only one theme by Shostakovich--and it doesn't need hundreds and hundreds of symbols. There are only ten noteheads on the staff, two beams and four dots. Music notation is astonishingly accurate and efficient. Spoken and written language was never designed to be able to describe music and only does so with extreme vagueness.

Most of what is written on this blog is my own brand of music criticism. Much of it is only possible because I can embed YouTube clips to everything I talk about. But when it would aid understanding I do not hesitate to insert musical examples. Why don't all music critics do the same? If we push back against musical illiteracy we will either get fired or perhaps start to turn the tide...

Here is the first movement of the Shostakovich 7th Symphony. The theme notated above doesn't start until the 5:41 mark.

Pre-Literate and Post-Literate Music

In the five-volume Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin makes the important point that we should not assume that polyphonic music began with the notation for polyphonic music. Historians of music rely on the documents available, but need to realize the limitations of the documents. Taruskin calls the development of mensural music notation the development of 'literate' music and this is an interesting way of looking at it.

Musicians had many ways of fleshing out monophonic music. One of the most documented was the English practice of turning a single melodic line into choral polyphony. We have an early example in the very famous Sumer is icumin in rota or round.

Here is the first line in the original notation:

Click to enlarge

Each subsequent voice enters at the spot marked with the red cross. In addition to the round part (instructions on the score call for four singers) there are two, two-measure accompaniments that flow back and forth between F and G harmonies. From other evidence, it seems that this is merely the tip of the iceberg and that there was a well-established tradition of extemporaneous choral singing, especially in England.

No-one knows how far back this and other kinds of polyphony might go. But from around the turn of the millennium in the year 1000, steadily over the next five hundred years the ability to write down polyphonic music precisely grew steadily until we arrived at our modern system of notation, which, barring some small improvements, was complete by the end of the 16th century. But we should always be aware that there has always been a huge non-literate musical culture. Where literacy helped was in the construction of more elaborate compositions--and even more importantly the ability to set them down in a way that made them easy to learn and perform not only by musicians in the same town, but by ones spread across Europe. The transmission of music was hugely aided by notation.

But now we seem to be moving into what one might call a "post-literate" era in which more and more listeners, performers and even composers do not read music. Popular musicians may or may not read music, but some of the most famous, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, have said on many occasions that they have never learned and never felt the need. The development of recording technology has replaced a great deal of what music notation provided. Instead of a possibly misleading notation, we have an exact, more or less, record of exactly how the piece sounds. I suspect that this transition may have consequences that we have yet to be aware of...