Dear readers, one of the things I love most about my job is that I get to work with students of all ages and levels, from very young beginners through very old beginners, and from fabulous pianists who are very young through fabulous pianists who are…less young. I am not picky in choosing certain “categories” of piano students to work with—because, as I hope you can tell from reading Pride & Practicing, I am interested in empowering us all to practice our best and play our best, whatever that means for us, no matter who we are. And it is a delight to witness how the discoveries unfold for such a wide range of musical explorers.
One of the particular joys of working with beginning students has to do with the miracle of musical notation. How astonishing it is, when we think about it! Before we come to the ways in which it might also be seen as blunt or limited, let’s first celebrate how incredibly ingenious it is, for humans to have developed and codified this assortment of dots and squiggles on a page which can enable you and me to read the mind of a composer from across the world or across the centuries, or both, and bring their music to life. It is amazing and delightful. Some young students’ jaws drop open as they are first exposed to the rudiments of the whole thing and they begin to grasp how it works. Others, however, take quick stock of the system as it is and are not satisfied! Some are driven right away to invent their own, new-and-improved clefs, note values and markings. It is just such a young student, in fact, whose florid and complex new musical symbols have inspired this post.
When I was in high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts (there was no U in its acronym in that era, so my old t-shirt is a collectors’ item now), we all took a class called “Notation.” The intrepid Mr. Gburek, our instructor, had begun his own career as a teenaged accordion virtuoso, and as I recall he had (as perhaps all accordion players must?) a wonderful sense of humor. This surely came in handy, endeavoring as he was to convince a rowdy band of ninth graders that it matters how tall a note’s stem is (a sixth up or down from the note-head, unless beams require otherwise), or where exactly the treble clef sign loops back to the left after billowing out like a sail on top (this should be just below the 4th line. Often it is not, yet we must somehow go on). Although you would think my classmates and I might have felt quite put-upon, sitting there writing treble clefs over and over like a bunch of first graders (magnificent young artistes that we took our teenaged selves to be), the fact is that it was a lot of fun, up there in Room 606. Though Mr. Gburek himself surely had something to do with that, there is also a certain allure to musical notation, a mystique. When we pause to consider it, and refrain from taking it for granted, we can see the whole system as an exciting sort of cipher, esoteric and intriguing, like Morse code only with music on the other side. We are lucky people who can read it! It is the key with which we unlock such unspeakably beautiful treasures, and the tool that enabled those treasures’ creation in the first place, and that facilitates their continued existence in this world.
I am thinking about writing musical notation the old-fashioned way: by hand. Although by now, my own musical handwriting is probably illegible to almost anyone except myself (sometimes I can’t read it either. It is Clifton’s fault), still I love writing music out by hand. Is it nostalgia for my high school Notation class? Is it the allure of the “secret code,” or the elegance of the notational system itself? Or is it related to any of the “Top 10 Reasons to Learn Cursive” that I just read about, all of which seem pertinent to the question of handwritten musical notation, and the last of which, interestingly, is “Increased self-respect”—? Having witnessed countless children’s pride in their own hand-notated musical creations, the point rings true to me. And oh, how my heart sinks when they bring in, instead, an incoherent jumble of notes that they “composed” on some free notation software, randomly stabbing at various (computer!) keys until the page was full. I am old-school about this, conflicted even on my most generously forward-thinking days. I think of the beautiful music manuscripts of composers of the past; I think of my own intimate experiences sitting at the piano with manuscript paper and pencil, experiencing musical “thought” and putting pencil to paper right there as it unfolds; I think of Mr. Gburek…. Then, maybe, I also remember that my own manuscripts are illegible to all but me. Perhaps I like it that way (that one might be Anna’s fault)….—but I DO get myself over to the computer and type the thing up. Only after my pencilled chicken-scratches are complete and ready, though! Otherwise, my own self-respect would suffer. And it suffers enough every time I try to figure out how to upgrade my operating system or when that spinning beach ball grinds me down. This other, notation-related damage to my self-respect is something entirely preventable.
Yes, dear readers, a practice tool will be coming soon addressing our skills and our relationship with musical notation with a pencil. (Hint: it will not require you to draw treble clefs… but go ahead and do that too, if you’re inspired.) Today I am just making a plug for our notation! Pausing to appreciate its wonders and to thank it. This miraculous phenomenon, which began in the 9th century as a simple set of reminders for monks (who already knew the melodies) of the upward or downward movement in their many chants, has evolved into an elaborate system that can cause even a piece we’ve never encountered before to spring to life in vivid detail, “from scratch” as it were. There is quiet; there is a page full of dots and lines and symbols; suddenly there is Chopin! That music we see on the page? Frédéric picked up his pencil one day, there at his piano, and wrote it down by hand. And those fingerings you see in your Urtext edition that are in italics? Those, dear readers, are Chopin’s own fingerings, that he worked out and wrote in, the fingerings he preferred for his own two hands. Hands to pencil to paper; hands to keys. Chopin’s pencil to our hands at the instrument. Doesn’t that bring us into a kind of intimacy with the composer, as a person-at-the-piano just like us, a friend? And doesn’t that lend something rich and inspiring to our sense of connection, then, with the music itself? Also—look how those treble clefs swoop down perfectly just below the fourth line of the staff…
We pianists very seldom play from manuscripts. We play from big, beautiful Henle editions printed on acid-free paper and bound so that the pages stay flat even after the most treacherous page turn. Okay, that doesn’t always work out. But—my twin and better half, Ingrid, is a Baroque violinist who has played from manuscripts for decades, and finds printed music (on those unfortunate occasions when there is no alternative and she must use it) so cold, so institutional. So ugly! Certainly, reading the musical handwriting of composers of the past (OR PRESENT) is a skill to be developed, and one may or may not have the time or inclination to develop this one along with everything else that crowds our piano-playing lives. But if you play, I bet you might know a Bach invention or two….. so I invite you to find one here that’s familiar, and take some time to play it from Bach’s own hand. Hint: take the time up front to figure out the clefs; read intervals more than notes. Have fun! Notice what this brings you.
As the twentieth century progressed, of course musical language was stretched in all kinds of ways, beyond the breaking point of the tonal system (and back again)… and our time-honored system of musical notation has gotten stretched and pushed and pulled, too, and has bumped up against some limits. Although this system is entirely capable of describing the magnificent fullness of, say, a Brahms symphony, showing each player exactly what to do and when, the question also arises: does that which our notation enables influence our understandings of that which is possible or that which can exist in music? If we can’t write it with existing notation, can we think it, imagine it, hear it? Many live happily within the bounds of the language that already exists; for others, that is not enough. Many composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have invented their own notational symbols or entire new systems. Symbols now exist for the notation of microtones (frequencies in between the pitches we recognize as part of our chromatic scale). Methods of notation have been created to describe elements of chance (in which the piece is never played the same way twice); and composers have found ways to convey to the player their intentions around all kinds of extended instrumental techniques, everything from placing objects in between the piano strings to bowing the violin on the other side of the bridge to playing a wind instrument without its mouthpiece. And for a wonderful full-circle link (that is a pun, you’ll see) from the beauty of Bach’s musical manuscripts to new orientations towards notation in the twentieth century, do a Google search for George Crumb’s “graphic notation.” I am refraining from adding a link, because this music is not yet in the public domain, but many images are available on a quick search and if you haven’t seen these scores, they are really worth a look (and listen).
When you’re done with that…. Google Karlheinz Stockhausen too, and look at some of his notation! Take it to the piano—I dare you. Playing off that Bach manuscript doesn’t seem so bad now, does it? So Western musical notation has gone from that to this. From medieval illuminated manuscripts to Bach to Crumb to Stockhausen, and splintering out into as many different directions as there are musicians whose visions point them to sounds not adequately described by existing symbols. And today, in an age of electronic music, notation may be almost obsolete. The synths don’t need it, after all, and they are smarter/faster/more accurate/more in-tune than we are….
…..and that is painful to me. So I will cope by retreating into most of the music that most of us play most of the time, the music which came to life through this particular system of notation and has been sustained by it through each successive generation (at least so far). Even in this repertoire, though, there is so much, and so much that is so important, that cannot be notated. Not because the right symbol hasn’t been invented! For different kinds of reasons: because the expressive qualities in question are ineffable. Or—because certain qualities (of expression, or sound, or freedom of rhythm) naturally shift and change so much in the music that to indicate every nuance would be far too cumbersome. Or even because part of the composer’s intent or understanding may be, or may have been, that certain things must be left to the performer. That there is a point at which the composer must let go and the player must take over. We understand then our responsibility as players: to interact genuinely with the elements that are shown on the page—and to initiate (through our own understanding, our sound, our playing as a whole, our hearts) the alchemy that generates all those qualities which are not shown on the page, the mysteries of musical expression which no notation could ever spell out.
So—notation has its limits. Still, I will miss it when it’s gone.
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That was beautifully articulated and I am going to sharpen my pencil right now...! Thank you for directing my fingers from my computer to a deeper way of expressing the song of my heart.