Notation<\/p>\n
The very fact that we can commit musical ideas to paper is extremely important: it means that these musical ideas can be preserved for centuries (as opposed to an oral tradition). Most of you will be somewhat familiar what musical notation looks like on paper, regardless of your ability to read music.<\/p>\n
Notes and reading guide<\/p>\n
The notation of music<\/p>\n
Musical notation appeared in Europe in the middle of the ninth century (that is, sometime around the year 850 CE). As you might imagine, it looked radically different than the notation we are familiar with today. In the following image, you should be able to discern four lines of text, which is Biblical and in medieval Latin. The melody to which this text is sung is notated with the dashes–known as neumes–above the text. Their position relative to the text was indicates pitch: the higher the black dash, the higher the pitch. Here pitch is notated in relative terms only: the neumes suggest the shape of the melody but don’t tell the musician the exact pitches (A, C, E-flat, and so on).<\/p>\n
A significant development was the introduction of lines that allowed the indication of exact pitches (again, rather than the example above, which doesn’t indicate exact pitches, just how high or low they are relative to each other). The following example, which dates from the 12th century, shows these lines. Using a system like this, lines and the spaces in between indicate specific pitches. Therefore, moving a dash from a line up to the next space indicates moving up one pitch, or one step in the scale. Move again to the next line, move another step up…so on and so forth:<\/p>\n
A sidebar: one interesting aspect of musical notation in the European Middle Ages (roughly 1000-1500 CE) was how often it crossed over into the realm of art. Consider the following example, a performance of a song notated in the shape of a heart. Maybe it won’t surprise you that the song is about…love.\u00a0<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=I-k11GGpYjk<\/p>\n
By the 17th century, musical notation assumed a form that looks a great deal like the notation that we use today. Notice that the concepts of using dashes to represent pitches and a system of lines and spaces to indicate the position of those pitches are very old aspects of notation:<\/p>\n
Musical “works” or imaginary objects?<\/p>\n
Chapter four of Cook\u2019s\u00a0Music: A Very Short Introduction\u00a0shows some of (perhaps unconsidered) implications of notating music.<\/p>\n
(A few small things you might stumble on: the English use different terminology for some musical elements. For example, what Cook calls a \u201ccrotchet\u201d is what Americans would call a quarter note. Cook also mentions a \u201cDAT recorder,\u201d which is a miniature tape recorder that people used to record interviews, notes, etc. in the pre-digital days.)<\/p>\n
Cook begins by demonstrating how limited written notation can be and references an early recording of Charles Gounod\u2019s song \u201cAve Maria\u201d made in 1904 by the castrato Alessandro Moreschi. Below are two very different recordings of the same song (the first is the 1904 version Cook mentions). Both singers are performing from what is essentially the same notated music. Listen to each and compare:<\/p>\n
Charles Gounod, \u201cAve Maria,” 1904 performance by Alessandro Moreschi<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VfxuO2Jvk5s<\/p>\n
Charles Gounod, \u201cAve Maria\u201d in a recent performance by the Italian soprano Cecilia Bartoli (accompanied by the St. Cecilia Academy Orchestra directed by Myung-Whun Chung).<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=R7TP03bwKAM<\/p>\n
Listen to each excerpt a few more times and try to put into words differences that you hear. You might consider relying on some of the terminology you’ve encountered (for example, how is the singer\u2019s timbre different?). Obviously there are different instruments accompanying the signer in each version, so you can restrict your comments to the singers\u2019 performances if you wish. The goal here is two-fold: first, to get some more practice informally describing music in words and second, to consider the limitations of written musical notation.<\/p>\n
Then take a moment to think about the differences you’ve just identified in terms of musical notation. What is notation good at recording? What might it miss?<\/p>\n
For your written responses<\/p>\n
Collect your thoughts on these questions–What is notation good at recording? What might it miss?–in a paragraph of at least 5-6 sentences. You are welcome to answer the question with respect to the “Ave Maria” examples, or more generally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Notation The very fact that we can commit musical ideas to paper is extremely important: it means that these musical ideas can be preserved for centuries (as opposed to an oral tradition). Most of you will be somewhat familiar what musical notation looks like on paper, regardless of your ability to read music. Notes and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-97895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97895\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}