Musical Notation
When NASA launched the Voyager missions in the 1970s, one of the ways that they chose to represent humanity to the universe was through music. Twenty-seven songs were chosen in the hope that they could be the harbinger of Earth’s culture should the Golden Record ever be deciphered by an alien intelligence (Taylor, 2019). While we have no way of knowing if that musical message will ever be received and decoded, the very fact of the existence of the Golden Record speaks volumes about the importance of music to humanity. One of our most cherished intellectuals of the twentieth century notes that “[t]he first beginnings of music lie even deeper in historical obscurity than those of speech, the relics of which are very much older” (Einstein 1953). Einstein goes on to speculate on how primitive members of our genus may have found the power in musical expression, thus highlighting music as a fundamental quality of humanity. Although language as we know it came sometime after music, systems for recording language have been with us for far longer than for those of music. In addition, systems of writing have been invented repeatedly in different parts of the world: “the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, and (probably) India all developed a system of writing” (Gnanadesikan, 2011, p. 2). Written language has succeeded despite the ever-changing nature of human vocabularies, scripts and grammars. Music, on the other hand, has not enjoyed such a sustained history of written success, which may seem surprising since the vocabulary of music seems rather less varied in nature, and quite self-evidently must exist in far smaller quantity than spoken language. The impact of the development of written music has had a significant impact on the pedagogy of music education in the western world. How students interact with musical scores has both many parallels and many stark differences from how they interact with the written word.
In the western world music has only been written in any form of sustained manner since the seventh century. In his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville made an important comparison between music and language. Music, he said, “because it is something perceived by the senses, vanishes as the moment passes and is imprinted in the memory. Whence came the invention of the poets that the Muses are the daughters of Jupiter and Memory, for unless sounds are held by the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down” (The Etymologies, III.xv). His connection with the written word is made even more important since the foundation of his work was based on the idea that “letters are tokens of things, the signs of words, and they have so much force that the utterances of those who are absent speak to us without a voice, [for they present words through the eyes, not through the ears]” (The Etymologies, I.iii). In the seventh century a singing voice could not enjoy that same representation in absentia since there was no way to represent the sounds of music (Rankin, 2018). In Isidore’s lifetime, many of the necessary components necessary to produce a musical notation were in existence. Rankin has pinpointed the seventh century as the beginning of the development of musical notation (2018), making Isidore the unknowingly last great intellectual of western Europe to aptly lament the absence of a written musical record. This development would also facilitate a change in the way music could be learned. Without a written mechanism, it can only be presumed that many musicians learned their craft much in the same way as their contemporary artisans, at the feet of a master who passed on their knowledge through demonstration and supervised practice. In essence, musicians learned the language of music (pitch, rhythmic patterns, tones) much in the same way they learned spoken language, by being immersed in the audible influence of its sounds, with the addition of observation of its various techniques.
The first phase of the development of musical notation were focussed on the voice, largely through the influence of the Catholic Church. The nature of the notation was shaped by its purpose; to satisfy the liturgical requirements of sharing scripture and religious songs (Rankin, 2018). The first musical notations, written on holy texts, “were dependent on recall and intentionally designed to support that recall” (Rankin, 2018, p. 354). Presumably the church was trying to standardize the musicality of the liturgy and assist the priests in delivering a consistent tonal and rhythmical pattern. Individual priests would have spent years learning the chants through demonstration and repetition, but greater consistency could be achieved by providing visual reminders in the texts using this early form of musical notation. Rankin has found evidence for at least six different methods of musical notation that developed in this early period, each of which conveys one or more of the following musical characteristics: melodic movement, duration, intensity, articulation, tone-colour and voice production (2018). The actual notes to be sung were of little importance in this period (evidenced by their lack of representation). Each priest could therefore sing whatever notes might best suit his own voice, but must follow the rhythmic patterns indicated in the symbolic notation (Rankin, 201). The symbols themselves likely acted a kind of symbolic art that could be easily memorized by a literate priest familiar with the ornate patterns of his contemporary manuscripts, but were likely primarily a mnemonic aid for a patterns that had been learned by hearing and doing. One wonders if a neophyte priest, previously unfamiliar with a chant could have learned it through the notations alone.
In the eleventh century Guido d’Arezzo introduced a notation for recording intervals between notes by introducing the staves, or horizontal lines, across which the symbols could be written (Einstein, 1953). The words drove the rhythmic patterns but now a voice could be modulated in a specific pattern of pitch. The next three hundred year period, known as the Ars Nova, would see an increasing emphasis on both the visual and the sound quality in musical notation (Dillon, 2016). These musical notations, still written in manuscript form, likely still acted similarly to the illustrative flourishes that were already part of such manuscripts, as mnemonic aids and guides to meaning. Dillon has noted that art historians see these notations as an art form that acted on the medieval “inner senses” (2016, p. 7). Music was becoming a cultural product (Rankin, 2018) by which composers were communicating directly to the inner senses of their listeners through their ears, and to the performers of their compositions through their eyes. Pedagogically, innate visual understanding of the cultural product might also act as an aid to learning the musical patterns for those performers.
The next significant change in musical notation as a cultural product would come after the invention of moveable type printing. In 1501 Ottaviano Petrucci “devised a practical method for music printing” (van Orden, 2013, p. 172). The nature of music notation, as already described above, remained essentially artistic, which Petrucci dealt with by adapting his printing technique to print each page twice, first with the staves and second with the notes which he could set using moveable type techniques (van Orden, 2013). This was time consuming and expensive if there was even the slightest error in alignment due to the high cost of paper (van Orden, 2013). A technical improvement would be found in 1528, but in doing so it would sacrifice the art. A French printer, Pierre Attaingnant, created a system where “each piece of type included both a notational symbol (note, rest, clef, etc.) and a small segment of staff lines; a typographic innovation that allowed the staves to be rendered in pieces that aligned, character by character, across the horizontal expanse of the page” (van Orden, 2013, p. 174). This mirrored movable type, single pass printing of text, but left noticeable gaps in the stave lines that are visually unappealing. The printing could be fast, economical, and accurate, but the artistic quality of the page was gone. In the mid fifteenth century it took over 20 years for three magnificent musical manuscripts to be produced in Florence, remarkable for being “massive in size, … refined in script and musical notation, … spectacular in decoration, and … precious in binding” (Tacconi, 2013, p. 165). Less than one hundred years later, Attaingnant set and printed 170 full editions of musical work between 1528 and 1551 (van Orden, 2013). Perhaps this was the point where learning to read music (as we think of it today) became a conceptual process separate from performance. With the loss of the art, the value of a musical composition as a cultural product must have shifted to its performative outcome. Since the notation had become arbitrary and detached from any artistic (and therefore sensory) meaning, written music might then have begun a loss of its cultural meaning, culminating in the modern era where cultural meanings now reside primarily in the sound.
In his history of music, Einstein credits the achievements of Petrucci for producing “as great a revolution in the history of music as book-printing had done in the history of general European culture” (1953, p. 42). While this may be true, it also undoubtedly led to a separation between music notation and its roots as a visual art form. Music pedagogy reflects this separation. Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit. FACE. These are the mnemonics most modern music students now use to learn to ‘read’ music. The notes have meanings separate from their sounds and can be learned independent of an instrument or musical composition. The sentence “I forgot my music.”, spoken by countless music students in schools through the western world, no doubt, does not mean they have forgotten how to play or sings a song, but that they have left behind their primary pedagogical tool; they have left behind the written notes as the sole representation of the music. Without the artistic connection between the sounds of music and visual indicators of its rhythm, music has become bifurcated into two distinctly separate entities of notation and sound. The score has become a stand-in for a musical piece for the student and performer, but remains unknown and detached for the listener. For an alien race, decoding Voyager’s Golden Record to play its sounds would be a technical challenge. But this is likely a simpler process than decoding the arcane musical notation that has come to stand in for those sounds.
References
Clement, Richard W. (1997). “Medieval and Renaissance book production”. Library Faculty & Staff Publications. Paper 10. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/lib_pubs/10
Dillon, Emma. “Seen And Not Heard: Symbolic Uses of Notation in the Early Ars Nova.” Il Saggiatore Musicale, vol. 23, no. 1, Casa Editrice Leo S. Olschki, 2016, pp. 5–155.
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011). “The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet, (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons.
Isidore, and Stephen A. Barney. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville . Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Rankin, Susan. Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe: The Invention of Musical Notation. Cambridge University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108368605.
Tacconi, Marica S.. 18 Sep 2013, Manuscripts from: The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture Routledge Accessed on: 04 Dec 2021. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203629987.ch19
Taylor, Dallas. (Host). (2019). Voyager Golden Record [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty Thousand Hertz. Defacto Sound. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord
van Orden, Kate. 18 Sep 2013, Printed Music from: The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture Routledge Accessed on: 04 Dec 2021. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203629987.ch20