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!

Guido of Arezzo

The Italian monk Guido of Arezzo (~990 - ~1033) is probably the most important figure in Western music history that most people have never heard of. He is credited with two innovations without which the whole history of music would have been quite different. The first of these is the staff, the set of five lines that tell us exactly what note to sing or play. Before then the predecessors to the round note-heads were squiggly neumes and they gave only a very sketchy idea of what the notes were. The idea of drawing lines to create a spacial metaphor for pitch was so astonishingly effective and simple that we have used it ever since. To my knowledge, this breakthrough was made by no-one else, no-where else, at any time.

Guido's second contribution I will introduce with a little musical number:

Now where did those stupid syllables come from? Not from the pen of Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist for the musical. No, they come right from Guido of Arezzo, a thousand years earlier. He spent much of his time training choir singers and developed a method for teaching them to sing--from his newly-invented staff notation--melodies they had never heard before. Sight-singing it is called and every music student still learns how to do it. In order to teach the techniques, he used this hymn with words by Paul the Deacon and the music probably by Guido himself:

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If you look at the first word of each phrase you see the following syllables: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. This doesn't include the last phrase, Sancte Johannes. What is interesting about this tune is that each phrase starts one note higher: C, D, E, F, G and A. Very useful for teaching about the notes of the scale (or mode, as it was at this point). Later on, so as to have an open, not closed syllable, the first syllable, ut, was changed to doh. Also later on, when the idea of the scale was developed, they added one more syllable for B and they made use of that Sancte Johannes phrase so the syllable was si. This is how I learned solfege in Quebec: doh, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, doh. In other places, like the set of The Sound of Music, they use the syllable ti instead of si.

So now we know the horrible truth: Rogers and Hammerstein stole the basic idea for the hit song "Do-Re-Mi" from Guido of Arezzo's hymn "Ut queant laxis." Here is the original:

Basic Materials of Music

I was once instructor and coordinator of a college course with that name, intended for non-music majors (music majors were expected to already know all this stuff). It occurs to me that I talk a lot about music 'literacy', but I don't offer much help! Based on comments, it seems as if a lot of readers of this blog are already highly-trained musicians. But perhaps some readers, the ones who don't comment, might benefit from some basic information. Please let me know in the comments!

Let's start with reading. I think that reading music is a very simple skill, at least at the beginning. I start my students off with it in the first lesson. Oddly, no-one taught me to read music. My mother never learned and I played by ear for the first two or three years as a pop musician. When I realized that if you wanted to work with orchestral instruments, you needed to write down what you wanted them to play, I just taught myself.

Here is how it works: musical notes are written down with hollow and filled dots on a grid. Each dot stands for a single note. That is really all there is to it! Historically it took a long time to work it all out, especially how to show rhythms, but the system works very well. The grid is called a 'staff' and it has five lines:

That funny looking thing at the beginning, called the "treble clef", is a very stylized letter 'G' and where it curls around the second line from the bottom it shows that that line is the note we call 'G'. Right after it is a thing that looks like the letter 'C'. That is a "time signature" that tells you about the rhythmic structure of the music. It isn't a letter 'C', but a half-circle and a sign that dates back to the Middle Ages. It actually means "tempus imperfectus" and means, nowadays, that each little box, called a "measure" will have four beats. That hollow thingy sitting in the second space from the bottom is the note 'A'. Music, unlike the alphabet, only has seven notes: ABCDEFG. So if you go up from A, you go to B and C, but if you go down from A, you go to G and F. So that's why the note in the space above the line that we know is G is A instead of H or something.

I teach guitar, not piano or violin, so now I will show you how the staff relates to notes on the guitar. Here are the open strings of the guitar as they appear on the staff:

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As you can see, the notes on the guitar go far outside the staff! The reason is that what I am showing you here is a kind of notation originally developed for singers--vocal notation. So a five line staff is big enough to accommodate the range of most voices. The piano has a very large range, so they get to use two staves: the treble one that I've shown here, and another lower one that uses a bass clef instead of a treble clef. Guitarists manage to get by with just the one. OK, so if you sit down with your guitar and play from the bass strings (the thicker ones) to the treble strings, you will play the notes I showed above. All those notes on the frets that the left hand plays I'm just leaving out for now!

We have some notes, now we just need some rhythms. Here is what rhythms look like, written down:

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This is all played on the FIRST string of the guitar, that is, the thinnest, highest-sounding one. Count aloud a few sequences of ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR. Make sure that you count evenly. What you are doing is just measuring time in packages of four. Four what? Four beats. Tap your foot if it helps. Ok, now you are ready to read the rhythms above. The first bar (up to the first barline) is easy. Count 1234 and every time you say a number, play the first string open. The next bar has one longer note. It takes up two beats: 1 2. As you say "1", play the note and let it keep ringing as you say "2". That's it. Then just play two more notes for beats 3 and 4. The next bar has two longer notes so you play on 1, let it ring as you say "2", then play on 3 and let it ring as you say "4". The last bar is easiest of all: play the note as you say "1" and just let it ring as you say "2" "3" and "4". If you have got each bar figured out, then go back and do the whole line. Congratulations, you can read both notes and rhythms. Everything else is just refinements!

Now am I oversimplifying? Well, I think I am simplifying just the right amount. Compared to reading words in a book, reading music is really pretty simple. Now of course, you spend your whole life learning the refinements and subtleties, just as you do with language. Why just the other day I learned a new verb: to impend, which I had known only as a gerund.

After all that, time for a treat. Notice that they are playing while reading the notes:

UPDATE: a friend sent me some good suggestions via email, so I have gone back and clarified some things.

Overdetermined vs Underdetermined

These words apply to how much information a composer puts into a score. Very early polyphonic compositions were underdetermined with respect to rhythm because a good system of notating rhythm hadn't been developed yet. Sometimes a composer might underdetermine a score for a specific purpose. For example, this unmeasured prelude by Louis Couperin is written entirely in whole notes because the rhythms are very free and left up to the performer.

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My piece for guitar ensemble that I put up in this post is underdetermined with regard to co-ordination of the different instruments because I wanted to see if I could write a piece that had no ensemble issues. But the overall trend for the last 500 years has been towards more and more specific details in the score such as dynamics (non-existent before the 18th century), rubato, playing techniques, accents, articulation and timbre. Here is an example of a 20th century piece, chosen pretty much at random:

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In this we see a fairly high level of determination: tempo is defined with a metronome marking of 100 beats per minute; nearly every note has a separate dynamic marking (mf); each note also has a specific articulation (. or - or >) indicating a short, long, or accented note; dynamics are often connected with hairpins indicating a swelling or diminishing sound; and later on there is a scattering of additional information such as poco pesante (a bit heavy) and poco marcato (a bit marked).

Greg Sandow has a long and illuminating review up on his blog of a Schoenberg concert in which he talks about the problems performers have with the music and how it is rarely performed both accurately and with heart (musically). I think the reason is that the music is overdetermined. Schoenberg is simply asking for too much control over how the players perform each and every note. If you want to see how truly mad this can get, have a look at a score by Brian Ferneyhough. His piece Cassandra's Dream Song looks like a very complex piece for piano, but is actually for solo flute.

At the other extreme there are composers like Morton Feldman or John Cage who intentionally underdetermine their scores. Here is a page from a piece for four pianos by Feldman:

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No dynamics and virtually no rhythms. Some graphic scores don't even indicate specific notes. There are reasons behind why a composer chooses to over- or underdetermine a score. It is up to the performers and the listeners to decide if the composer made the right choice!

Music Notations

The New York Times has an interesting article by a composer on notation. He gives as an example the piece I have chosen as the motto for my blog: "Belle, bonne, sage" by Baude Cordier. But at the beginning of the article he mentions a kind of maxim: "The score is not the music." Later on he says, "It seems quite obvious that no individual performance of, say, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is the entire work." Yes, quite true. I have long since accepted that there is no definitive recording of the Haydn quartets, or the Beethoven quartets or piano sonatas, or Chopin or anything. There are some very fine recordings, with important differences. There are also some not very good recordings.

But one example comes to mind from more recent history. The Beatles never felt the need to learn to use musical notation for two basic reasons. First of all, they were very creative and "wrote", that is to say, came up with, created, songs the way the rest of us eat breakfast. If they created a song that was so unmemorable that they couldn't remember how it went, well, no big loss. Second, from fairly early on they had access to recording studios and this is quite a good substitute for musical notation. But there is an interesting consequence to all this. There is indeed a score to all the Beatles' songs. It is the product of a quartet of transcribers who did the best they could to render the recordings into standard notation. But this score is even more than usual not the music! The music is the recording in the case of the Beatles. They created much of it in the studio and the recording is not only the music, it is THE definitive performance above all others. The recording IS the composition. In this rare case, a particular performance of a group of compositions is the work. Now, is it the entire work? In other words, does Frank Sinatra's cover of "Something" add to the composition or is it essentially complete in its original version?

Interesting question...

Common Time

As we all learned from our music teachers, that funny 'C' symbol after the clef means "common time". Sssuuuurrre it does! Actually, the symbol 'C' is not the letter 'c' at all, but a half circle. In the 14th century the predecessors of our time signatures were invented. In the beginning there was only triple or perfect time, indicated by a circle, the perfect geometric shape. "Imperfect" or duple time, was indicated with a half circle. This indicated the number of beats, either three or two, in the measure. But they also had the ability to indicate whether these beats themselves divided into three or two subdivisions. This was indicated with a dot. A circle with a dot indicated three beats and each beat had three parts. In our metric notation we would show this as 9/8.  A half circle with a dot indicated two beats and each beat had three parts. We would show this as 6/8. But a simple half-circle with no dot indicated two beats, each of which divides into two parts. They called this tempus imperfectum cum prolatione imperfecta. "Common time" takes a lot less time to say, though. Here is an example from an old manuscript. You can see the time signature as a little 'c' on the second space from the top, right at the beginning after the clef--a C-clef on the bottom line:

From the Chansonnier Laborde

Music and Literacy

I once posted a review of a book on Shostakovich's orchestral music on Amazon. The book was one of those that avoid any musical notation. The 'general reader' nowadays is assumed to be unable to read music and that is probably true. If we go back fifty years say, to Ernest Newman's hefty book The Wagner Operas, we find it stuffed with musical examples. Now the book on Shostakovich is quite useful. It tries to describe what is going on in the music and when talking about the 5th Symphony, which is on the accompanying CD, relates the comments to specific places on the disc: "at 3:28, the flute comes in with a new theme" for example (a hypothetical quote). But I found the lack of musical examples frustrating. Any mention of technical terms, even ones like 'eighth note' or 'quarter note' or 'dotted note' was avoided. The author does however talk about sonata form and passacaglia and forte. A kind of half-way solution. Nearly all books on music these days tend to follow this rule: no notation!

As a result of this, the author is forced to use metaphors all the time. The music "gallops", "whistles" and "barks". Themes "panic" or are "jerky" or "gawky". But we never are quite able to see any of this. You can probably sort it all out by close listening: "ah yes, that must be the gawky theme he is talking about." So the book can be quite useful and the author's heart is in the right place. I'm afraid I gave it rather a critical review on Amazon to which the author irately replied. I called all this "baby talk". Quite a few other readers concurred with me though.

A consistent theme in these posts will be the appreciation of learning. I like it when authors try to teach us stuff. I like to learn stuff. If you feel moved to make a comment pointing out something I have missed (as someone did the other day on the "Loudness Wars" post) I will be quite grateful. I don't like the attitude "you don't actually have to know anything." The more you know the better. If you are a music lover and listen to a lot of classical music, even knowing a little bit about music notation will be a great boon. It's not that hard.

The development of music notation was one of the greatest achievements of the human mind--a far more difficult one than the development of the alphabet. It occurred once in human history, in Southern France and Northern Italy around the year 1000. The Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo was an important figure--at least the only one whose name we know! Prior to this music was written in neumes, that merely gave a suggestion of melodic shape. The brilliant innovation was to draw a horizontal line that defined exact pitch. This was soon refined into four lines and then five. Modern notation uses five lines. This enabled composers to write down exactly what notes they wanted. It then took about five hundred years to solve the problem of rhythm and this was done by using different kinds of note heads, by drawing vertical lines to mark off each measure and by inventing the tie, that joined two note heads together. Voila, modern notation. It is so highly evolved that the soundtrack to a movie can be recorded in a single two and a half hour session by studio musicians. They simply read it at sight! Most of the music you hear in movies, if it was played by living musicians, was played once only.

It is really not that hard to learn the basics of this wonderful system and it will open many doors for you in understanding music. Here is a whole (short) prelude by Chopin, first the notation, then a performance:

Notice I said THE notation and A performance. The notation IS the piece. The performance is just a version.

I have been teaching guitarists to read music for many years. You can start doing it about five minutes into the first lesson. In some ways it is a lot easier than learning the alphabet. The musical alphabet only has seven letters for one thing. Sure, rhythm takes a bit of work. But worth it. There is nothing quite like literacy.