I've got a couple of unusual ones for you today. First up, the Mischa Elman Quartet that Taruskin cites as an example of how late-19th century players actually played:
To our ears the frequent portamenti just sound overdone, too much. Of course, this is why early music specialists are now setting their sights on 19th century music to adapt it as well to our modern taste. Next up an album talked about in today's New York Times: Abdul Wadud’s Cosmic Cello Music Gets Another Moment in the Sun
This leads me to mention one point Taruskin made about the nature of our modern taste: it is text-centered, hence literalistic. I can support this in my own experience. When I was making the transition, which took a couple of years, from a rock and blues guitarist to a classical guitarist there were a couple of elements. One was the shift from an aural environment where you play everything by ear, to a text oriented environment where you, basically, follow the text (though not without interpretation). While I was going through this I remember attending an evening of jazz piano which I found excessively self-indulgent. Why would I want to listen to this overlong, poorly thought-out performance? All it was, mostly, was random noodling. I was developing a love for the texts, those wonderfully mysterious books that contained an unimaginable wealth of musical ideas. So when I listen to Abdul Wadud's album, it sounds to me, mostly, like random noodling.
But lately I have been doing more random noodling of my own in connection with composing a new guitar piece: I'm trying out all sorts of things on the instrument before I write anything down. But, as a transitioned musician (heh) I do in fact write it down. Finally, let's have one of those more solid, traditional, weighty performances of Bach, done before all this music was lightened and brightened according to our latest taste. Otto Klemperer, Matthew Passion, 1961:
We think of music theorists as being rather remote from actual musical practice, living in their own world of abstractions, but in the early 14th century music theory, at least as it concerned mensuration and notation, was being revolutionized by actual mathematicians--and ones who wrote in Latin no less!
The older Franconian notation used rhythmic modes but this system was not flexible enough for the needs of the newer music, the ars nova. Mathematicians such as Nicole d'Oresme and Levi ben Gershom, author of the treatise De numeris harmonicis, wrote about integral and fractional exponents and, as the title indicates, this was regarded as revealing the truths of how God ordered the cosmos.
On the more prosaic level of musical mensuration, the goal was to tweak the old notation so that it could handle both the perfect, i.e. triple, division of the long notes (ironically named "breves") and the imperfect division, i.e. duple. 14th century theory saw two levels of division: the breve into semibreves and the semibreves into minims. The first was referred to as the tempus and the second, the prolation. With both the triple and duple subdivisions, that allowed for four different metric systems, what we would call "time signatures." Here is a chart from Taruskin's History (p. 254):
Sorry for the blurry image--the original was quite tiny. But I think you can see the modern equivalents, from the top down: 9/8, 3/4, 6/8 and 2/4. The interesting thing is the symbols used as key signatures: the circle with the dot indicating triple tempus and triple prolation: tempus imperfectus, prolation major, the circle without the dot indicating duple on both levels and so on.
All of these symbols are long gone, of course, given that they are six centuries out of date. But wait a minute, what about that bottom one, the half-circle indicating tempus imperfectum, prolatio minor? Could that possibly be the same as the one still in use to indicate 4/4? Yes, you bet! Music teachers (except the ones trained in musicology) tell their students that this is a "C" standing for "common time" but of course it is not, just the last remaining holdover from the ars nova notational system.
To go with this, here is a little motet in the new style by Philippe de Vitry, Tribum / Quoniam secta / Merito hec patimur. One of the new elements is that all the texts are in Latin.
This is from the Roman de Fauvel, one of the most viciously satirical pieces of musical narrative ever composed.
UPDATE: Looking over that chart and my comment, I think there are two errors. First, in the chart, the second item should read tempus perfectum, prolatio minor because the breve is divided into three semibreves, not two. And then I followed the error in my comment: on this one I should have said "the circle without the dot indicating triple tempus and duple prolation." Mea culpa! But the chart is also wrong.
When I was a young person at university I used to find especially worthwhile those blue books with the gold lettering from O.U.P., the Oxford University Press. One I especially prized was A History of Greece to 322 B.C. by N. G. L. Hammond (partly because a friend got it autographed for me when he gave a lecture at our university). Why 322 B. C.? That was when Alexander died, of course.
The University of Oxford is considering scrapping sheet music for being 'too colonial' after staff raised concerns about the 'complicity in white supremacy' in music curriculums.
Professors are set to reform their music courses to move away from the classic repertoire, which includes the likes of Beethoven and Mozart, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
University staff have argued that the current curriculum focuses on 'white European music from the slave period'.
Oxford University has had a pretty good run since being founded in 1096 A.D. But it seems to be coming to an ignominious end. Mind you, it might not be quite as bad as it sounds. If they are just talking about courses for non-music majors, then this is no big deal. I used to teach a very large section of what was basically music appreciation and there was no requirement to learn music notation. But if Oxford still has actual music majors then I presume they are still using notation.
Or, perhaps Oxford is going to focus more on the music of contemporary society. I notice on the same page of the Daily Mail an article on one of those artists, Cardi B, who is showing off her back tattoo. Presumably the students will be "reading" things like this instead of music notation.
I am a pretty good sight-reader, but I notice lately, since I do a lot less playing than I used to, my sight-reading isn't quite as good as it used to be. If I am in a scordatura, with the 6th string in D or the 3rd string in F#, I might occasionally forget I am in the tuning. And I probably wouldn't be able to zip through a virtuoso Giuliani score the way I used to. You have to put a lot of hours in every week to keep these skills up.
Sight-reading is a lucrative skill. If you can do it accurately, you can play a lot of ensemble music and do studio work. I have mentioned this before, but every orchestral soundtrack you have heard in a movie was recorded in ONE SESSION of two and half hours. This is a single "service" under the Musician's Union contracts. Most if not all of the score was played once and once only. Session musicians are people who can walk in, sit down and play whatever is on the stand. Pretty impressive. Mind you, it would be easy to write parts that they simply could not play at sight--but if you do that, they will never hire you to write another soundtrack! Film composers are usually going to stick to things that are reasonably easy to read.
Some instruments are tricky to sight-read on: the guitar for one. Every time there is a chord, which might be three, four or five notes together, it is likely that it can be played in some positions, but not in others. So you have to make some quick decisions--or leave a note out, which is what the really seasoned players do. Today, just for fun, I tried to do something I haven't done in a long, long time: sight-read a vocal and guitar score simultaneously. Sure, it's possible. I picked a very easy little song, "Delicate Beauty" by Henry Lawes, the 17th century English song-writer. If you are reading a vocal part and a guitar part at sight, you are engaged in two quite different things simultaneously. You have to find where the starting note is for the voice and then read the intervals and reproduce them. At the same time, you are reading the guitar part (originally the accompaniment was a bass line, perhaps with some figures to indicate inversions, but I was playing from a version for guitar in three or four voices) and have to decide which finger to put on which note. Oh, and also, there are words so you have to read them as well. Sounds complicated, but if the song is very simple as this one is, it is not too hard. I had a student that took up the lute and got very good at performing Dowland, singing and accompanying himself. As he was playing from the original lute tablature, he would actually be reading three entirely different systems of notation simultaneously: vocal notation, the lyrics and lute tablature which consists of letters on a six line staff (one line for each string or course and letters to indicate which fret). Here is how that looks:
At the top you have ordinary vocal notation on a five-line staff. The clef, though funny-looking, is an ordinary treble clef. There is one flat and the time signature is 3/2. Under that staff are the lyrics in ordinary Roman letters, though since it is the 16th century, they show a lot of 's' letters as 'f's. Underneath that is the lute tablature. This is French tab, with the 1st string on top and letters for the frets. 'a' is open, 'b' is first fret and so on. In Italian tab they use numbers and the 1st string is on the bottom, not the top:
Click to enlarge
The easiest to learn is the tablature of Luis Milan, the Spanish vihuela composer as he uses numbers with the 1st string on top, which is the same as the tablature used today. The Germans used a very different system entirely and one with a number of archaic features probably indicating it predates the printed and manuscript copies. Each fret on each string is not shown with a simple and logical system, but with its own symbol. First of all, the five upper strings are notated differently than the 6th string, which means that the system was originally for a five-string lute. The five open strings are indicated with numbers, 1 2 3 4 5. The notes on the first fret are indicated by letters running across the fingerboard, a b c d e. These letters continue for the second fret, f g h i k and so on. Madness! Just to add to the confusion, there were several different systems used for the 6th string. Here is a sample:
This is the kind of job you give to a musicologist, of course: transcribe all these nearly unreadable German tablatures into either French or Italian tablature so modern lutenists can read them, or into ordinary vocal notation so guitarists can read them. I once met a musicologist who had obviously done a great deal of this as she claimed to be able to sight-sing from German lute tab. Think about it... Now that would be a very complex mental operation, indeed!
I mentioned sight-singing. This is part of standard training at music schools. Ear training consists of learning to hear and identify intervals, harmonies and rhythms by learning to write them down. This is called "dictation." The opposite process consists of looking at a written-down melody and singing it at sight. These used to be widely practiced skills if you go back a few centuries, but now they are fairly specialized. At McGill first year sight-singing required that you sing simple melodies at sight, like I was doing with the Lawes. Second year sight singing used a text called Quatre-vingt Études de Solfege avec Changement de Clés which translates as Eighty Studies in Solfege with Changing Clefs. This means that every two or three bars, the clef would change: treble, bass, alto, soprano, tenor! Agh! Plus, the melodies were extremely chromatic in the first place. Pretty much a sight-singing nightmare. For third year you had to sing atonal melodies at sight. Oh, yeah!
Apparently the left side of society is more "open" and therefore more creative, according to psychologists. Well, maybe, but lately it seems as if an inordinate amount of that creativity consists of finding ever more creative ways of wreaking havoc on the cultural traditions of the West. Today's example comes from the Guardian with the innocuous title: "Music education is now only for the white and the wealthy." One might assume that the article is going to be about extending the benefits to the non-white and non-wealthy, but the author, Charlotte Gill, goes much further:
For a creative subject, music has always been taught in a far too academic way, meaning that theoretical knowledge is the main route to advancement. While there are routes into musical careers for the untrained, and many pop, rap and grime artists have never studied music formally, there are also dozens of choirs and amateur collectives that put a huge focus on musical notation.
This is a cryptic, tricky language – rather like Latin – that can only be read by a small number of people, most of whom have benefited from private education. Children who do not have the resources, or ability, to comprehend it, are written off. Even when they are capable performers.
So what she really wants is to return music to the pre-literate state it had before the invention of music notation a thousand years ago. As is so often the case, the author's attitude is shaped by her own biography:
I cannot sight read. This is something that means I cannot join the many choirs around the UK that name this as a requirement. The patterns and figures of music don’t easily unravel in my mind. I suspect that’s the case for many other children and adults; some get notation, others don’t. Neither is indicative of talent, but while we do not find lateral, inclusive ways to engage people – as well as loosening our ideas of what constitutes musical ability – we are losing masses of would-be performers.
The inability to sight-read is certainly indicative of a lack of talent in that area, one would think.
The insistence on theoretical understanding is underpinned by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, which sets the most widely-used music exams. To meet its requirements, pupils must work through limited repertoires of old, mostly classical music, focusing most of their efforts on mastering musical literacy, above songwriting, composing, or even enjoyment.
Damn those Associated Boards for privileging classical music over songwriting!
Well, I won't keep quoting, as you get the idea. The basic precept of post-modernism is that there are no values and therefore, no need to teach any understanding of them, theoretical, aesthetic or otherwise. The only thing that matters is your subjective whim, here cleverly disguised as "enjoyment" as if the very idea that anyone anywhere might actually enjoy performing and listening to classical music is a very peculiar one.
Ms Gill got rather a lot of pushback from professional musicians, as related at Slipped Disc:
Charlotte C. Gill (‘Music education is now only for the white and wealthy’) argues that ‘to enable more children to learn [music], we must stop teaching in such an academic way.’ While rightly noting the increasing chasm between state and private education in terms of music provision, her conclusions about musical notation and theoretical skills amount to simple anti-intellectualism.
Gill dismisses the study of music ‘theory’ and argues patronisingly that musical notation is ‘a cryptic, tricky language (…) that can only be read by a small number of people’. This claim flies in the face of countless initiatives over two centuries making musical literacy available to those of many backgrounds. As with written language, musical notation enables effective and accurate communication, as well as critical access to huge amounts of knowledge. In many musical fields, those without it will be at a deep disadvantage and dependent upon others.
Gill’s comments about ‘limited repertoires of old, mostly classical music’ are unfounded and presented without evidence: composing, listening, singing, and playing are embedded in much musical education, which also widely encompasses jazz, popular, and non-Western traditions. Claiming that classical music comprises a limited repertory is inaccurate: composers have been adding to its repertory for centuries and continue to do so. We agree with Gill that aural and other skills are equally important as those in notation. However, through her romanticisation of illiteracy, Gill’s position could serve to make literate musical education even more exclusive through being marginalised in state schools yet further.
There follows a very, very, very long list of signatories.
Speaking of choirs, Guido of Arezzo invented the idea of a lined staff largely to be able to record specific melodies. He also invented a way of sight-singing to help choirs learn to read this new-fangled writing.
If things keep going in the direction they have, then in a few years I fully expect someone to be opining in the Guardian that the idea of requiring students to read at all is unnecessary. English is, after all, a cryptic, tricky language and learning how to read it largely unneeded now that we have audible books. If you are creative, just dictate your novel into your iPad or iPhone. Really, what is the point of requiring anyone to read written languages?
Our envoi is the Symphony No. 5 by Prokofiev conducted at the Proms by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. You will notice that many of the people onstage are actually reading from musical notation. The performance itself starts just before the 5 minute mark:
A lot of what we see or hear is like walking in a forest or a field and noticing the trees or flowers or hills and dales without much awareness of the underlying geographical features. You might get a sense of either ascending or descending, but unless you are actually in the mountains, not much more. But fly over the countryside in an airplane and you get a very different sense. Just before New Year's I flew back to central Mexico from the US and was surprised to see how much of the country north of where I live is uninhabited mountains. There were just a few roads, hamlets and individual farms, widely separated by entirely uninhabited mountainous regions.
I've been reading a book on world musics lately and and starting to get a sense of some interesting underlying geography. I have posted on some ideological questions before in this post: "The War on Classical" because the book has an editorial animus against classical music, which it thinks is uppity or something. Also, some of the individual authors of the chapters on different world musics seem to bend over backwards to assert over and over again either that their music is just as aesthetically good as classical or maybe just a bit better because it isn't tied down to all that fixed notation and stuff.
The article on Turkish music I found particularly annoying. It turns out that the two major theorists on traditional Turkish music were both from outside Turkey, one the Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir and the other Ali Ufki, originally a Polish church musician, Wojciech Bobowski, who was enslaved in Istanbul, converted to Islam and became a leading composer and the first to adapt Western notation to record Turkish music. You have to love a culture where even the musicologists are slaves. The Ottomans had a propensity for slavery: the elite core of their army, the Janissaries, were all recruited from enslaved Christian boys.
But I am getting away from what I want to talk about: the underlying geography of world music.
In one musical culture after another I run across comments which outline a cluster of approaches to music:
No matter how many Turkish musicians are playing together at one time, they all focus on executing a single melody line, though each may interpret it differently.
Indian music is generated through a complex modal system ... which provides the basis for composition and performance to happen simultaneously (what Westerners call improvisation)
Whereas a Western composer notates the work on paper in a more or less fixed form ... Thai classical composers notate nothing: their compositions are created in their minds and then committed to memory.
Most of the female singers were jawari or qiyan, singing slave girls. These were indeed slaves, in that they could be bought or sold, but they were also highly-trained performers, sometimes fetching extraordinary prices... (referring to the music of Medieval Andalusia, al-Andalus)
Although the music was never notated - musicians have always learned this repertory aurally - by the sixteenth century songbooks had begun to circulate. These included the lyrics along with musical indications of the melodic modes. (referring to Andalusian music)
(In Chinese opera) Over time and a wide area, two basic creative approaches developed. One was the qupai system, where the librettist wrote lyrics to go with standard named tunes called qupai. To put it in Western terms, the librettist might specify, "sing to the tune (qupai) Yankee Doodle".
The instrumental groups of a gamelan perform specific functions, and their dense polyphony is created from just one melodic strand, drawing from a repertoire of patterns peculiar to each instrument.
For most musicians, in most cultures, for much of history, music was an oral or aural tradition: it seemed entirely fitting that it be so as music is the most insubstantial of the arts, consisting of nothing more than compression waves in the air. By an act of pure creative genius, one Guido of Arezzo came up with an ideal solution for the notating of exact pitch: the simple idea of a horizontal line. All pitches could be judged in their relation to that line. Soon after, for even better precision, four more lines were added and voilá, the music staff was born. Mind you, it took another few hundred years to solve the problem of how to notate rhythms clearly and simply, but a few more acts of creative genius solved that too. As a bonus, since pitches could be written down clearly, that meant that Western musicians could notate not only melodies, but also harmonies. And if you stacked a few staves on top of one another, you could have a notation in which the entirety of an orchestral score could be seen at a glance. While there have been a number of other notation systems developed in other cultures, all of them are more like mnemonic guides than real systems of notation. The only time and place where a good music notation system was developed was in Western Europe between about 1000 AD and 1500 AD. Some other things that were uniquely developed in Western Europe: vaccines, antibiotics, the machines of the Industrial Revolution, the rule of law, and, sadly, modern warfare. But hey!
Since Western Europe, during those same years and for hundreds of years afterwards, also saw the development of musical styles and structures that did not develop anywhere else, such as true imitative counterpoint, tonal harmony and modulation and all the thousands of musical things that come from that, it is very likely that these developments presupposed musical notation. Don't you think?
So there are two basic musical approaches: the aural or oral tradition, and the notated, composed tradition.
Without a good musical notation to work with, music tends to be monophonic, with a heterophony of similar melodic lines, rhythmically complex, with a lot of extended rhythmic models and other formulas that need to be learned by rote, and essentially weak or lacking in genuine harmony. This, along with a tendency to be structured according to a poetic text and the likelihood of a complex treatment of pitches in the melody, describes nearly every non-Western musical style, whether it is from Thailand, China, Morocco or India. These are all markers of what is essentially folk music, that is, music transmitted via oral tradition and without what we would call composers as such.
The musical structures that we find in Bach, Mozart or Bruckner, depend on the ability to notate often very large musical structures, and do so clearly and creatively. Without notation, I think that the very concept of a composer as we find in Western music, just can't exist. The reason is that if you can write musical ideas down, sketch them, play with them, modify them, you are making the internal external where you can work with it. In all the other musical traditions, most of what the musicians are doing remains concealed, unexamined and therefore, not available to the composer's creative imagination.
This is Anton Bruckner - Symphony No. 6 in A Major with the Münchner Philharmoniker conducted by Sergiu Celibidache:
UPDATE: Just to head off any potential misunderstanding, I am not criticizing any particular musical culture here. More and more I realize that Asian music has a big influence on my compositions going right back to the 1970s. My point is just that the underlying geography of nearly all non-Western music is quite different from how music has developed in the West since the discovery of music notation.
Composers are very concerned about notation because it is both the record of their creative ideas and the primary conduit of instructions to the performer. The long history of notation is largely a progression from less precise to more precise, but we may have reached a plateau in terms of useful notation. Here are some interesting remarks from composer Kyle Gann:
I complained to the singer I’m working with that some of my composer colleagues insist that virtually every note in a score should be marked with a dynamic and articulation marking – something I refuse to do. She replied: “Oh, I hate it when I feel hemmed in by the composer. I want to look at the notes and think, ‘What do I need to do to bring this line to life?'” That’s why I’m working with her. I would be irritated working with a performer who needed to be spoon-fed every phrase-shape, just as I would be bored writing a piece that sounded the same no matter who performed it.
I am in exactly the same situation these days with a singer I am about to start working with. We are going to record all of my song sequence Songs from the Poets and I have been going over the scores with a fine-toothed comb, proofing and editing. Like Kyle, I tend to not notate every interpretive detail. I notice that the comments to the post are fully in agreement. I talked about this once as the problem of Overdetermined vs Underdetermined several years ago.
The real background to this, what Kyle calls the "Eternal Argument" is actually an ideological one, but with an historical dimension to it. If we look back at the works of people like Bach, Haydn and Mozart, we do not find a forest of dynamics and articulations and phrase marks. For example, here is the opening of Haydn's Symphony No. 39:
There is a minimum of indications apart from the notes themselves: just a single dynamic for each part (piano), some slurs and a couple of staccato dots. To any person familiar with Haydn's style, this is enough. With Bach we get even less:
Yes, I know it's terribly fuzzy, but I think you can see that there are no dynamics or articulations or metronome marks, or even a tempo marking.
But, beginning with Beethoven, a lot of what we might call the "style" of a work, the basic ways in which it would be played or "interpreted", began to be manipulated by the composer. Beethoven began to make dynamics a structural aspect of the composition and so had to indicate them pretty precisely. This process continued well into the 20th century as composers more and more needed to construct, not only a particular piece in a particular style, but the style itself, essentially new with every piece. Eventually we ended up with scores that look like this, Structures by Pierre Boulez:
Click to enlarge
I hope you can see that (click to enlarge) because every single note has a dynamic and an articulation, making for a very dense score. This is essential to the style of this piece, because all these aspects are part of the serialized compositional structure. But, just as this makes for an abstract kind of music, without traditional expressive content from the composer, it also prevents the performers from adding expressive content themselves.
But, for my songs at least, I just don't want to try and predetermine every expressive gesture by the singer. I want the singer to discover the interpretive nuances for herself. As one commentator said on Kyle's post:
To me it seems that if the composer covers the score with markings, they do not trust the performer. As a student conductor said to me years ago, if the performer is in tune with your music, they will play it properly; if they are not, no amount of dynamics or other markings will make them in tune with it.
This being "in tune" with the music is rather a subtle concept, but this is what performers do: they study and work with a piece of music until they understand it, feel it and are comfortable with it. Sometimes they have to learn a new style, but as no musical style is hermetically sealed off from all the others (mind you, there are exceptions!), this is something that performers do as a matter of course.
I'm really looking forward to working on the songs with the singer as I hope we will work out some of the style together.
For the envoi today, I pick the first of Britten's Songs from the Chinese, perhaps the finest set of songs for voice and guitar written in the 20th century:
A few days ago I got a couple of very challenging comments on my blog. One was on the post "A Cathedral and a Motet" and asked the following:
Do you know of a book that explains how Dufay, Ockeghem, etc. wrote their more intricate compositions? Not just a simple explanation of isorhythm or a rudimentary explanation of 15th->16th century counterpoint, but: if I am Dufay and I am going to write the music above in your post, how exactly do I go about accomplishing that?
Now I spend most of my time trying to write, you know, 21st century music, not 15th century music, but this is such an interesting question that I wondered how it could be answered. First I went to my shelf to see what books might contain some answers. Composition is, for a very large part, notation. In other words, what we can write down and how we write it down IS the piece, or at least the definitive instructions for performing the piece. So I took down one of the oldest books in my library The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900 - 1600 by Willi Apel, originally published in 1942 and, I believe, still in print. It is the most thorough textbook on the old systems of notation. It contains facsimiles of a lot of older notation. Here, for example, is a three-part chanson in white mensural notation by Guillaume DuFay.
If you look very closely at the top, there is a little line of text above the staff that says "Guillermus du" and then a little bit of staff with the note "fa". This is often how he signed his name on a music score. But wait, this is not a music score in the modern sense. I will explain below.
There are two pieces on the page. At the top is Quel fronte signorille and the bottom is the chanson "Dona i ardenti". Transcribing this kind of notation into modern notation is the work of a graduate doctoral seminar in musicology. As you can see, reading the original manuscripts is not easy! For comparison, here is the beginning of that chanson in modern notation:
Click to enlarge
The transcription into a modern score does several things: it takes all the original pitches and puts them on modern clefs and also changes all those weird boxy hollow notes (hence, "white" mensural notation -- there is also black and even red) into modern rhythmic values. But one other very important thing happens. The original is three separate parts just stacked up. They are not aligned rhythmically at all. A big part of the problem of transcription is figuring out exactly how the parts align. At this point in music history the score, where the various parts are precisely aligned rhythmically and corralled within barlines, had not yet been invented.
This gives us an important clue about DuFay's compositional methods: he did not compose in score! Like most composers before the 17th century, DuFay was a singer. The others, like Francesco da Milano, were largely lutenists. As a singer, how he likely composed was each line separately. In other words, what he probably did was write down the tenor and then compose the cantus and then the countertenor. This is not how modern composers work, by the way.
In the text, the DuFay chanson is chosen as an example of [2, 2], meaning, in the orthography of the text, that the tempus and prolatio are both imperfect. Huh? Ah yes, nothing like a bit of Latin to brighten one's day. In answer to a question in the comments about mensuration, in modern notation there is, within the notation, only one kind of subdivision to any note: duple.* In other words, every whole note contains only two half notes, every half only two quarter notes and so on. But in white mensural notation they had two possibilities: duple and triple or imperfect and perfect. In this kind of notation the brevis and semibrevis (usually rendered in modern transcription as a whole note and a half note or a half note and a quarter note) are the ones where we see the division into three. The mensuration or subdivision of the brevis is called the tempus and the two possibilities are perfectum and imperfectum and this was indicated in the time signature. The mensuration or subdivision of the semibrevis is called prolatio and, again, there are the two possibilities of perfect and imperfect, i.e. triple or duple subdivision. There are, therefore, four possibilities as indicated in this handy chart from the text:
The old time signatures are interesting. For one thing, this is where our "C" time signature comes from, often called, by ill-educated music teachers, "common" time. As you can see it is the old white mensuration time signature for "tempus imperfectum cum prolatione imperfecta". The so called "cut" time, which is the same half-circle with a slash through it indicates in modern music that the half note takes the beat.
Now that doesn't tell you exactly how to write a mensuration canon à la Guillaume DuFay, but it will give you an idea of the notation at least. For practical exercises in modal counterpoint I can do no better than recommend another excellent text, this one by another McGill professor, Peter Schubert, titled Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style, which was published in 2008.
*In modern notation we can indicate any subdivision whatsoever, but we do it with a workaround, essentially going outside the notation itself. To indicate a triple subdivision we write a little 3 with a bracket. But we can also write a 5 or a 7 or anything. The most extreme I have seen is something like 13 in the time of 12. This is how we think of it: we stuff extra notes into a fixed beat. Works quite well.
Luckily we can find the DuFay chanson on YouTube. Here is Dona i ardenti with unknown performers:
One of the most treasured books in my library is one that was given to me many years ago by an old friend. It was originally published in 1942 and is still in print. The book is The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900 - 1600 by Willi Apel and it covers the whole period of the development of musical notation from the first struggling efforts to figure out how to notate more than one voice (the "polyphonic" part) up until the final elements were discovered enabling the easy notation of rhythms, complete by around 1600.
Paleography refers to the study of all forms of ancient and historical writing, of which musical notation is, to my mind, one of the most interesting. Imagine the problem: here you are faced with the problem of keeping an accurate record of, say, the unaccompanied plainchant of the monks, and all of a sudden they start adding voices and creating complicated music. And all you have had to work with were some little wiggly lines and dots that probably originally were nothing more than accents and punctuation marks accompanying ordinary writing. After some early and very ambiguous examples from the 9th century, one of the earliest notations that is clear enough for us to transcribe into modern notation is an example from the Abbey of Saint Martial in Limoges. The manuscript shown below is a two-part piece of music, an organum, written in Aquitanian neumes. The staff lines are just scratched in the parchment and have been drawn in so they can be visible in the facsimile:
The text is "Viderunt omnes", a Christmas gradual. Here is what it looks like in modern notation:
As you can see, while we can be fairly clear about what the actual pitches are, the rhythms are anyone's guess because the original notation does not show any rhythmic values. Figuring out how to do that took the next few hundred years! One of the early attempts at a solution was the idea of rhythmic "modes"--basically small cells of various combinations of long and short note values. Here is a sample of what that kind of notation looked like. This is a piece that I studied in a paleography course and you can see some of my faint pencil notes on the scan showing what lines are what notes and where the rhythmic modes start. I have also numbered the iterations of the modes:
And here is how the beginning looks in transcription:
Just to show you how complex some of the notation systems were, here is a piece by Jacopinus Selesses that uses white (meaning hollow notes), black (meaning filled in notes) and red (meaning colored red) notation:
All these examples are from the Apel book, still the most thorough treatment even now, though there is certainly a lot of recent research on the problems.
So that is my very brief and sketchy introduction to musical paleography. The book by Apel is over 400 pages long and very detailed.
This might be a performance of the first example above, but I'm not sure. It sounds like the notes, but as the rhythms can be different for each performance, I'm not positive.
And here is another organum from the St. Martial manuscript:
Regular readers will have noticed that I always get a kick out of reading the latest music journalism. Today, it comes from an unusual source, the Financial Times with an article on graphic music scores.
I don't remember the source, but I recall reading a commentary once where the writer was pointing out that if you read the newspaper or watch a tv program that deals with something where you have real professional expertise, you will be horrified at how much they simply get wrong. Now think about how this also applies to all those things you don't have detailed knowledge about: foreign affairs, economics, science?
When the topic is music or any of the arts condescension and snobbery are layered on top of the ignorance. Which brings me to today's article. It begins:
Music notation is at best a compromise, at worst a lie. In western culture a five-line stave suspending a pattern of dotted notes established itself as the universal language, the most efficient way to communicate musical ideas, and for centuries it went largely unquestioned. But, in the 1950s, a number of composers – Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage among them – began to treat notation with less reverence, using it more like a tool that could be played with, personalised and, perhaps, improved.
Conventional music notation, that lying compromise, is one of the most remarkable achievements of Western music and one that made possible a great deal of the rest. If there were no really efficient and accurate way of notating music, then the accomplishments of Bach, Beethoven and all the rest would really have been impossible, now wouldn't they? And in addition, we would not be able to enjoy their music today.
The truth is that when you approach a graphic score like the one from the article that I put above, you have remarkably little information to go on. And you have no idea what any of it could mean. It is really nothing more than an occasion or inspiration for improvisation. The actual musical performance could turn out well or not, but the quality of the performance and the quality of the score have very little, musically, to do with one another. The article makes particular mention of a piece by John Cage called Water Music. Here is an excerpt from the score:
The piece, originally named "Water Music" was re-named "Water Walk" for some later performances. We have a version of the piece, by John Cage, on YouTube. This is just an excerpt as the whole clip, which you can see here, contains a great deal of introductory commentary that isn't really relevant.
Now I mostly don't doubt Mr. Cage's sincerity, I really do think he was interested in exploring sounds in this way. But a whole lot of it is also astute marketing. The thing about modernism is that it was invested in opposing itself to all the traditional ways of making music. A composer could make a name for himself far more easily by doing something like this than by just writing another string quartet. The cost of this kind of procedure is that you give up the possibility of doing something with actual harmony, melody and rhythm. A pretty severe restriction, once you think of it. The tight control of the events with a stop watch (as discussed in the complete clip) is just a hilarious way of distinguishing this piece and performance from someone just mucking about with various sound-producers. But of course, it is a distinction without a difference!
I discussed Cage and this piece in more detail in this post.
Here is a paragraph from the Financial Times article discussing Water Walk:
“Some people might feel that graphic scores are in some way vague or abstract but I don’t find them vague at all,” says MacGregor. “Everybody thinks Cage is all about making it up and leaving it all to chance but ‘Water Music’ runs with a stopwatch and you know exactly what you should be doing when.”
MacGregor is Joanna MacGregor, a pianist who plays the piece.
The article ends by wandering off into the mystic wonderfulness of images:
It follows that moving images could offer a more truthful and piquant expression of creative ideas than words or notation. “Having worked with a lot of composers who write things down in a very traditional way, they’re always looking for ways to express a musical notation,” says MacGregor. “I had a discussion with Michael Finnissy about this years ago, about how music notation is never going to be entirely, scientifically expressive of what you, the composer, are trying to do.”
Of course, it doesn't "follow" at all. If you want a "truthful and piquant expression of creative ideas" then graphic scores won't do it in the world of music because, very simply, they don't tell you anything musical. They usually don't tell you what notes to play, what rhythms and what harmonies. If you are ok with that, as Cage often was, then fine. But ask yourself this: given this kind of ambiguity is there any possible way of distinguishing a really horribly bad performance of, say, Water Walk, from a spectacularly brilliant one? What if one performer gets all of the timing wrong? Forgets to use a stopwatch or just misses all the timing points? Would it make the slightest difference aesthetically? Would the audience be able to tell a good from a bad performance? Once you recognize this then the mystic allure of graphic notation pretty much evaporates.
Traditional music notation, however, is a very accurate depiction of what a piece will actually sound like. Here is Rubenstein to show us how it works with a Chopin waltz:
This is one of those things that is very rarely discussed outside of professional circles--and less often even within professional circles than you would think. I am talking about errors in the text, by which I mean misprints. So what? A misprint in a novel is not a big deal. You can nearly always figure out what was meant. Same with most non-fiction writing. When you get into poetry, it might get a bit dicey: what if instead of "love" is printed the word "glove"? Could be significant! Imagine a scientific article with tables of numbers. A misprint in one of those numbers could cause huge problems. The reason for the greater problem in some areas has to do with redundancy, I believe. In a novel, there is a high level of redundancy as you can always figure out the meaning from context. In poetry less so and with scientific papers and numbers especially there is little if any redundancy.
This is also the case with music. In a musical score, there are really no redundant items. Every note is written down and every rhythm, but the musical text also extends to things like phrase marks, dynamics, tempo and expression words and markings and so on. There is nothing on the page that is not crucial in some way to the performance of the work. So knowing that there are misprints out there, some of which have been printed and reprinted for decades or longer, is rather a disturbing thought! And what if there are others we don't know about?
Want some examples? A really famous one is the Sonata in B flat minor, op 35 of Chopin. Very important item in the piano repertoire. However, as Charles Rosen notes in his book The Romantic Generation
"In almost every edition (and consequently most performances) of [the sonata], there is a serious error that makes awkward nonsense of an important moment in the first movement. The repeat of the exposition begins in the wrong place."
Some of the early editions had a repeat indicated after the four measures of Grave, but as the first London edition shows, the repeat includes those four measures. The 20th century editions seem mostly to be wrong including the one I have, published by Dover. Some performers avoid the problem by simply not repeating the exposition! Here is Grigory Sokolov with the first movement and he plays the repeat starting in the wrong place, right at the 2:25 mark:
Here is Maurizio Pollini also repeating from the wrong place and, since this video includes the score, we can see the error.
What is the proof of the error? Chopin's music was usually published in three places: Paris, Leipzig and London. Only the German edition has the repeat in the wrong place. Here is the opening in the London edition, which is correct:
Click to enlarge
As you can see, no double bar with repeat sign after the first four measures. Horowitz, Pogorelich and Michelangeli also repeat from the wrong place. Rubenstein and Kissin do not, but that is because they omit the repeat. I have yet to find a recording that does repeat from the Grave, the correct place, but Rosen assures us there are such. Anyone playing from the edition Brahms prepared or who goes back to look at the original editions (just not the German one) will have the repeat in the right place, for instance.
Another example I can't lay my hands on, but as I recall, there are several measures in the Berg violin concerto in the solo violin part that are printed a fourth away from where they should be. This mistake has been recorded by Anne Sophie Mutter among others. Probably the engraver misread a clef. The error was discovered by a musicologist in the 1980s, but no-one seems to have picked up on it.
Beethoven is known to have complained that his published works have hosts of misprints like schools of fish. We sincerely hope these are all, or mostly, just things like misplaced dots or phrase marks, but we can't be sure. The original manuscripts are often not available.
These are all unintentional errors that can have serious consequences. But what about intentional editorial interventions? For a long time editors blithely 'corrected' Beethoven's inconsistencies in expression marks, failing to notice that often there was an expressive reason for them. This has died down in recent decades. But in the 19th century editors were very aggressive. One editor of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier 'corrected' the opening C major prelude by inserting an entire extra measure because he found Bach's harmonies just too radical! I mentioned the other day about another editor adding a sharp to an F in the Siciliano to the First Violin Sonata, again, because Bach's harmony was just too much. The incredible thing is that Bach is recognized as being the greatest harmonist of all time! And him we are 'correcting'?
But a large percentage of published music contains errors and often they go uncorrected. A manuscript of the etudes for guitar of Villa-Lobos just turned up in the 1990s (they were written in 1928) and while it seems to be a fair manuscript, there are hundreds of differences from the published edition.
Performers, especially those with some training in theory and musicology, can often ferret out misprints as they can sometimes be revealed through the harmonic context, but in certain kinds of repertoire it is impossible, or nearly so, to identify an error from context. Take the complex scores of Boulez, Stockhausen or Carter, for example. The texture is so complex that misprints could easily go unseen (and unheard) forever. Which raises some interesting aesthetic questions if you think about it.
I could go on, but I think I have made my point. Now let's listen to something I'm pretty sure is error free. Bach was absolutely meticulous about his notation, often inserting extra accidentals to be sure there could be no mistake. His favorite copyist, his wife Anna Magdalena, was equally meticulous. So most of the music we have from Bach is in a very reliable text. Here is Glenn Gould with the allemande from the First Partita for keyboard:
For most of the classical repertoire, it is usually possible to find the musical score online and download it for either study or performance. I do this frequently when I write program notes. I don't look at the score for every piece, but if I am puzzled as to what to say about a piece that hasn't been said many times before, I often have a look at the score. The place to find most scores is the International Music Score Library Project. You can browse by composer or by genre. They have the option of searching by melody, but I tried it for an obscure piano piece and it didn't seem to be helpful. Either that or I didn't use it properly. If anyone is an expert on this function, drop me a comment.
The scores come in pdf format, sometimes copies of the original edition, sometimes in a modern typesetting and sometimes taken from a later complete edition. I would include a page as an example, but you can't insert pdf files into blogger. But go have a look. It is a remarkable resource. There are others on the web, but I find IMSLP quite useful. Here is a link to a Beethoven bagatelle, for example.
I couldn't find the same F minor Bagatelle on YouTube, so this is one in G major played by Sviatoslav Richter.
