I may regret this... (I nearly called this thread 'What is music' but then thought better of it) but I wanted to pick something up from another thread:


My post where I said that Andy's definition of music was a 'silly simplification' was rather strident, and I regret the tone in the cold light of day, but I think that the point stands, and I'd like to expand on it (and see what anyone else thinks of course).

If you listen to an improvisation, you are hearing more than just a collection of notes and other instructions. But it is (I believe) music. If you listen to a performance by the Aka people, you are hearing more than just a collection of notes and other instructions. If you listen to electroacoustic music, it has often been written without reference to a score. I seem to remember reading somewhere in Bruno Nettl's excellent The study of ethnomusicology that the number of musics that are notated are far outnumbered by those that depend on improvisation or aural tradition.

I would hesitate, given this, to locate 'music' in the notation of Western music. The notation gives you the instructions to realise the music, and in order to realise the music you have to know a few things: basic music theory so that you can read the notation, the language in which any performance directions are written, and some degree of technique on the instrument. Now you can realise the notation. But is this the same as realising the music? We teach our students that it's important to put any piece that they are learning into context. So we can look at the title, the composer's biography, other pieces that they have written, research the performing tradition of this piece and pieces like it, research issues of authenticity and performance practice, etc. in order to get closer to the music that was intended. This is moving way beyond a collection of notes and other instructions.

If you merely interpret the notation then, sure, you're making music but we can go further, and we probably should go further. Even if you're a beginner, learning an elementary study, you're still picking up performance tradition from your teacher that makes it possible to turn notation into music. I'm probably over-egging the pudding here and I realise that I've taken Andy's original posting far too literally (sorry Andy  ) but I wanted to make my position clear.

Those who've worked in opera houses will know that there are - even now - many performers around who can't read music to a very high level...  and a few who can't read it at all.  (Without naming names, there are numerous performers of the generation just coming up to retirement who made big-name recording careers without being able to read music).  Are these performers "lesser musicians" because they can't read the dots?   I wouldn't say so.  In some ways their tenacity and dedication are all the greater for having made a career in spite of not having access to the marvellous convenience of notation.  Certainly I don't believe it's audible in their performances that they didn't learn their roles off the stave?

I've heard Macedonian shepherds play head-spinning dance-tunes with variations, all in 11/8 - stuff that would send your average Associated Board Grade-Eighter into an irrecoverable tailspin.  But they can't read a note.


Exactly, and no differently from the words we type here - which we all pronounce differently in real life.

I can't believe that there's any composer with even a modicum of performance experience who doesn't understand that the moment a piece leaves his desk, it will take on a life of its own, refracted through the experience and emotions of those who interpret it as performers and listeners, in much the same way as a child, though shaped by a combination of two sets of inherited genetic codes, starts to develop in its own way from the moment its born.

Even if we hear the same recorded performance in different circumstances it will almost certainly engender different reactions, so it's safe to assume that the same will happen in the translation from notes to performance (unless retrieved by totally mechanical means).

 Music, like poetry, was performed long before anyone thought of setting it down, and transmitted purely by aural/oral tradition, whereby the performance ethos and the material itself were learnt together. Notation has become a necessary adjunct to the dissemination of music, but it can only ever be a blueprint for performance, just as a route map can only ever give directions for an actual journey: in both cases they are two dimensional instructions for a four dimensional event which can't exist without human input, and may only be experienced through senses with which the written or printed material itself cannot directly communicate.

Impossible? I wouldn't have thought so. Impractical maybe, but really impossible?

... and there's always the way in which notation will invariably alter the sound of the created result (unless you internalise the rhythms to an absurd degree) ...
Would someone performing these "incomplete tuplets" (or whatever solution for which one plumps) perform them as fluently as the original improvisation?

On the other hand using proportional notation one would in fact be notating it entirely precisely, no?

...of course then one would lose the kind of information contained in the nature and history of the pulse-based system but I wonder if we're not here talking here less of sledgehammers and nuts than of the incompatibility of possessing and consuming confectionery?

At the risk of provoking a long detour ... how does Peter Wiegold's proportional notation work?