Discussion: How the advent of a music recording system changed the music itself
- Transfer
Rob Weir ( Rob Weir ): The recording system determine the connection between composer and musician. The more musical the notation, the stronger the composer's influence on the performance. The less detailed the record, the more freedom the performer has.
Initially, the musical notation was not very detailed, but over time its accuracy began to grow. For example, in the music of the beginning of the Renaissance, there was no designation for tempo or dynamics - the choice was left to the performer.
In Baroque music, the general bass was used - a technique where a musician improvised based on certain chords, as modern jazz artists do now.
In Beethoven's time, the pace was set using a metronome, but even this left room for improvisation, for example, in a cadence.
Now look at Mahler's symphonies written on the border of the 20th century. On each page left a huge number of detailed notes.
Yvonne Caruthers ( by Yvonne Caruthers ): A Rob addresses several important topics. I must add that thanks to the musical recordings, students can learn using the experience of past generations (the “discovery” by Bach Mendelssohn).
The types of notations of different composers differ from each other - how does their attitude to musical notation differ. Beethoven often wrote concertos for piano and orchestra, but did not make detailed recordings of the part he played. Why waste time on this? She was in his head, and he knew how to play her. So that this concert could be played by another orchestra with another pianist, Beethoven still had to record a piano part.
Some composers recorded the entire performance in the form of a sketch of the score for the piano, leaving the orchestration in the end (or asked someone to finish the work for them), others recorded the full version in detail.
Rob cited Mahler’s symphony as an example of one of the most detailed musical works, but I believe that Bartok wrote his most detailed compositions. At the end of each piece for piano, he specified the time for playing it. This meant that if the play was performed strictly at a given pace, its duration would be that many seconds (or minutes). This was Bartok’s response to the emergence of expressive performers who, too, in his opinion, changed the works.
David Leigh : I believe that musical notation has greatly influenced the history of music.
Music, unlike text in a book, is recorded using abbreviations. To understand a book, it is enough to read it aloud or to yourself - the order in which the words are arranged affects our perception with you - we can imagine the events taking place. As for music, simply by “reading” the notes, you cannot get a complete picture of the melody. The fact that musicians have a special set of “shorthand” characters is incredibly important.
Let's look at three ways to visualize music, and how our understanding of it would change if they became the main form of notation.
Spectrogram- represents the ratio of duration, frequency and amplitude of sound. The picture below shows the spectrogram of a simple melody played on a violin.
Here is the spectrogram of Rachele Gilmore’s performance, which performs a cadence in the aria of the Olympia doll from the opera Tales of Hoffmann:
Obviously, this recording method reflects the manner of performance well, but weakly conveys the pitch and rhythm. In other words, if the composer wrote the pieces in this way, he would spend a lot of time, specifying in which particular key each note should be played. This system is not very suitable for accurately transmitting pitch and rhythm.
So all the performers will sound almost the same. In theory, there would be one perfect performance, and everyone would be equal to it. That is why we do not use such a system, but if we did use it, our idea of music would be completely different.
Guidon’s hand . It was used in the twelfth century, but not for recording music, but for training.
The essence of this system is that it can be used to transmit sound transitions using sign language. She contributed to the development of counterpoint, a popular musical concept of the time, as it allowed harmonics to be built in a very simple and convenient way.
The “Gvidonova” hand was mainly used in polyphonic singing and was rarely used to standardize rhythm and create complex harmonics. If the music was presented in this form, then it would be easier to improvise, and most likely we would not see the block chords that are so popular today.
"Standard musical notation . " In other words, what we are using now.
Compared to the other systems described above, this one has clear indications of the duration of sounds. It precisely defines their height and tonality of the melody, and also gives instructions regarding the nature of the latter, but strictly within the framework of a given rhythm. Information about the level of performance expressiveness is transmitted figuratively and depends on the context.
The system does not specify how loud the forte should be, or how soft the piano should sound, which means dolce or teno. In this system, the performer has less control than others, but this does not prevent him from improvising.
The interesting thing is that everything could be completely wrong. When this system was formed, there was not much written music, and the composer was always present at the performance of his work. The performer was given the opportunity to improvise, but the recording system clearly indicated the strength of sound and rhythm, thereby avoiding errors in interpretation.
Now this is not so relevant, but we continue to use this system - it opened to us the music that we know today.
It is worth saying that pop music is rarely recorded in this way, because those elements that the standard notation describes are not used in it. The musical notation of modern classical music contains a lot of notes regarding melody and rhythm (that is, what the composer can control), because the methods of teaching music have remained the same.
If, say, composers began to record music using spectrograms, then the performers would have to be trained in a completely different way. The written music would also be very different from the existing one.
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