Copyright ©2007 by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
For clarity and exactitude and imagination, the traditional notation system is broken.
The mass of published repertoire tells musicians all is well because the marketplace follows the money, casting aside the new for the old, the exceptional for the mundane. Notes & lines, please, and scrub the weird stuff.
So there is a crisis in coding sonic expression. Current notational advances have stagnated while the previous half-century's advances were rejected. Inertial reluctance, regression of choice and marketplace fundamentalism are at work. Common symbology is limited, compact and conservative; software in a mass marketplace is conservative, too.
The collective effect leaves composers in notational twilight, picking up bits in the shadows and asking themselves, "will this work?"
Music notation is reconfigurable for meaning, but lacks embedded mechanisms for internal re-design. It also differs from text. Because text is recursive, it can tell about itself. Oh, and "a picture is worth a thousand words" uses words as a measure.
More an instruction kit than a language, music notation is extensible but deprecates to text when symbols are unavailable -- or made unavailable. Industrial publishing scrapes them away, using commoditized symbols to recast old publications and restyle manuscripts. Musics of diverse cultures and times are read through the identically ground lenses of 19th century Berlin or Rome or Paris -- and their digital doppelgängers today.
This is a crisis of clarity into the past -- as well as into the future's past. Composers use notation to communicate sound and ideas, and expect them to sustain. Yet their instructions are distorted through these foggy lenses.
It's been said that one learns an artform by copying the masters. But nascent composers copy from foggy, published, secondary works, editions where they study and integrate the shapes of the composer's writing -- the curves, architecture, phrasing, emphasis -- that have been mutated by editorial changes, technical adjustments, and an engraver's choices of balance and legibility. The original recedes. Implications are forsaken.
As a student, I earned tuition and upkeep by copying arrangements and parts, as well as copying scores to study. Then Cage's Notations was published; the world -- I believed -- had changed. I was wrong.
Ambiguities intrigue and irritate composers and performers differently. Composers, like writers, weigh the mysteries and implications of grammar and syntax. Performers, like actors, weigh the revelations of sound and presentation. After two hundred years of shared notational practice, the mysteries and the revelations have been pried apart by commerce.
Traditions pressure composers and their copyists and publishers. Common accidentals, for example, carry multiple implications and conflicting meanings and playing techniques -- whether identifying a note, showing its significance in the melodic and harmonic scheme, being part of a larger set of 12 or 19 or 43 or more symbols, or including implicit direction.
Composers involved in grammatical authenticity spell accurately -- and expect, however futilely, that those who read their scores will grasp their choices. Whether using a plethora of elusive verbal descriptions (what do andante or espressivo mean? how about Cage's screw and bolt?) or the markings performers are accustomed to changing (such as tempi, string phrases, or dynamic levels), composers employ a grammar and syntax -- a style -- within their music that is as open or mysterious as a composer intends, but externally ambiguated by time and place, after which editing and typesetting add value -- or a veil.
Notation progressed like a giant ball of dust, picking up flecks of visual usefulness as it rolled onward from the neumes of the first millennium to the serialists nine hundred years later. Industrial publishing captured the dustball at the end of the 19th century -- even as composers began to adapt symbols more diligently, recasting notation.
Some composers threw industrial notation over for mnemonic transmission, words alone, or oral tradition, while others advanced graphics, with expressed notes withdrawing from the main task of compositional cohesion. Circles and spirals and modules and trajectories appeared. The expanded musical vocabulary (chronicled in Notations and cataloged in Karkoschka's Notation in New Music) replaced the tortured manipulations of exhausted 19th century notation with an elegance and clarity.
Examples: Binky Plays Marbles, LowBirds (menu score), and Lunar Cascade in Serial Time: June. Each presents notational issues not addressed in 19th century notation. The Binky duet has separate, staggered time signatures and the double bass has three sets of alternating actions to play. The LowBirds performers have a menu score and individual menu parts whose contents are played within the symbols. In Lunar Cascade, the performer's grasp of improvisation within a 75-year aleatoric tradition is anticipated.
Music notation engenders disagreement and passion because it is so tightly bound to legibility, meaning, and especially physicality. Save for concrete poets, words' placement does not strongly affect how they read or signify; book designers may increase legibility or create visual style, yet the clarity or ambiguity of the words are unchanged. But how one spells -- and the publisher engraves -- a given symbol has implications to both legibility and meaning.
Moreover, there is a distinction in purpose and practice. We do not speak or read or hear or write words in even the simplest counterpoint; our understanding may be informed by ambience, but (save for concentrated interleaved listening) we obtain only one meaning-stream. (The vacant look at a restaurant table? The person opposite has switched streams to eavesdropping.) Music offers itself through a collective meaning of sounds. A simultaneous, "love of my life", "lice in the bed" and "minding your cat" make only a clatter of sound, meaning obscured. But the simultaneity of C-G-C, F-D-E, A-B-G creates melodies and a chord progression and an orchestration and a socio-artistic implication. That microscopic module contains greater implication than a Danish prince's lament over his being or nothingness.
As composer and copyist, I seek both authenticity and compromise, standing in defense of composers' methods while finding the most effective route to successful performance.
Composers create documents of musical and sonic ideas, sufficient but incomplete maps of compositions and the instructions needed to render them into sound. Where assumptions are made through other documentation -- jazz rhythms as recorded, Baroque ornaments as described or extrapolated, vibrato or portamento as handed down -- instructions are absent.
Since assumptions belong to the composers' own times and places, guidance may be sparse. Techniques vanish into history, instruments go obsolete, mnemonic devices change. Notational ambiguity is unclouded by historical knowledge and present history.
So as historical knowledge -- and repertoire -- build up like silt behind a dam, composers anticipate the forgetfulness of the future, and provide that future with increasing information. A pattern of notes on lines, once adequate, is now meager. Manners of articulation are specified, speeds communicated exactly, and techniques indicated. An extended library of musical symbols aids in disambiguation.
Many composers also believe that music's meaning is best conveyed if it looks like it feels, appears as it sounds. Yet the composers' manuscripts are transformed by publication -- or today's equivalent of publication, as more manuscripts are directly computer-entered. The character of notation and the composer's chosen details matter far more than a mere sequential count of pitches and durations.
Directors assess documents for content, structure and ideas that can be discerned from the composers' evidence. These are challenges. Composers may not have notated all the content, editors and publishers may not have rendered the content faithfully, cultural differences may create false cognates, and directors may not have time or ability to perceive and re-create musical coherency. That last matters. Directors should be -- but often are not -- conversant with the styles of new compositions. Nonpop can be without precedent, and so very personal.
With fifty years of notational variations from the avant-garde through minimalism to postmodern classicism to a distorted capitulation to older publication styles, directors may chafe at notational practice in endless transformation from 19th century methods -- as well as the investment demanded to learn a notational style that may be used just once. Yet can one interpret who cannot read?
Reading performers -- the mechanics-driven (using notation as instructions for placement of fingers and methods of presenting the sound), the music-driven (using notation as a guide to the sound) and body-driven (bringing abstract notation into their muscles to articulate) -- demand notational attention.
Ensemble and solo performers differ psychologically, as composers learn painfully; leaders and team players are as distinct in the musical world as they are in business or politics, with passive-aggressive behavior easily engaged by unfamiliar notation. And professional instrumentalists resent ambiguity, appreciate clarity, and expect efficiency. Compromise may be required. Instrumental notation is idiomatic, and composers who notate outside conventions -- accidentally or deliberately -- risk artistic dismissal and miserable performances.
Music, a real-time activity with symbolic representation, begins on the page and ends as sound, proceeding through recognition, short-term memory, biological and mechanical action, external interpretation, acculturation effects, and feedback -- placement, expression, tuning, and interaction with other performers -- all driven by a constantly changing stream of symbols. This delicate process is perturbed by illegible printing, dubious symbols, poor placement, cramped pages, or broken page turns.
It would seem that professional engraving software would facilitate the entire process. Ironically, software has not brought with it an increasing awareness of legibility, placement, visibility and convenience. And techniques of page clarity and balance learned through hand-copying have fallen away, before software has caught up with the past or the present. Just as notation software has set in motion a process -- and dependency -- similar to that which obviated such disparate tools as long division, spelling, typesetting, and stick-shifting, in this period of transition of both notation itself and notation software, a plethora of awkward scores drained of visual meaning are being made.
A century's resentment simmers between composers and music publishers. Publishers are businesses, and their interest in art is engaged only so long as it coincides with profit. In a corporatized environment, social commitment to artistic creation is evanescent.
Profit comes into play because coincident with the hyper-capitalistic trends came the fastest and deepest development of notational practice in the history of written music. Though it has continued to evolve since Karkoschka's Notation, the most explosive developments took place between 1920 and 1970. The 2005 SoundVisions (Möller, Shim & Stäbler) shows that development since has slowed.
Examples in Karkoschka and Cage are largely hand-written manuscripts or hand-inked fair copies, as one would expect during an era when typography was expensive and music was still engraved on metal. However, save for traditionally notated music, SoundVisions shows little change from the hand-inked era -- despite twenty-plus years of computer music engraving.
What has happened? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Software adopted symbology and techniques straight out of the 19th century -- measure-based, horizontal, graphics-free, note-bound workflow lifted right from the engraver's plates. It is as if the 20th century never happened. And it has an effect.
Notation and engraving software are fundamentally distinct. A graphical notation program has few limits, but efficiencies are gained when software handles tasks natively and musically, with a fluid interface, where sonic and musical information can be entered in sonic and musical ways -- even with respect to graphically intense scores -- and where proofing, playback and studio features are available.
Confirmation that notation programs are still based on 19th century models can be seen in the list of symbology weakly or not supported. Percussion notation, modern articulation symbols, tone clusters, circular accidentals and alternative noteheads require supplementary fonts. Stemless notes, feathered beams, beaming over barlines, and variable staff lines are kludges. Staggered barlines, beams breaking over objects, beamed flags, fractional or interwoven tuplets, angled stems, drawing on curves, time-based notation, circular or bent or angled staves, grid notation, arbitrary continuation lines, curved or broken arrows, and half-slurs or half-ties are all graphical kludges [ed: as of 2007]. Quarter-tones are marginally supported and microtones hardly at all, nor are dimensionable symbols, stretchable elements, and scores in color. Equitone, Klavarscribo, and the entire universe of graphical notation are simply absent.
This catalog of near-impossibilities is stunning. And creative people are not immune to their tools' limitations. When software defies working with contemporary techniques natively, and as composers come up through composition using computer notational tools, they will be inhibited by the enormous inconvenience of working outside of 19th century conventions. Imagination may stretch well past tools, but in practice, one produces practical materials -- under duress, temporal or economic. Among those in a forward-looking musical community, among friends, or where a reputation is such that performers are willing to (or paid to) spend time and energy creating a piece from hand-drawn materials, the tools -- paper and ink, say -- are no barrier. But materials move out of the circle of acquaintances. Publishers take them on, reprinting composers' manuscripts or hiring calligraphers and engineering drawing experts and specialists working in a combination of programs to create fine graphical renderings.
But the economics of publishing militates against hiring graphic artists, instead requiring scores to be submitted in digital format, camera-ready. (One of my engraving clients is a well-known composer whose publisher expects ready-to-print pages. He refuses to learn software and pays for engraving, with the joy of performance his only profit.)
This limitation may injure subsequent generations of composers. Software suggests -- demands -- ways of working with a score, even of conceptualizing it. Experienced artists can reject this or work around it, but nascent composers raised within software's commercial limitations are at risk of pre-emptive forgetfulness. Directors and performers are disinclined to assist the development of symbolic vocabulary. Ultimately, composers will have to re-build an advanced notational consciousness.
And then party like it's 1949.