Advantages/Disadvantages of Notation (not Mandolin Specific)

[JeffD]

I'm very happy that Mr. Watters' new book is in SN only, I do not like having to skip unnecessary tabs when reading music.

Masking tape! I kid you not.

[JeffD]

When I teach someone new to SN, I start with the sound -- most students can sing a major scale, since most of our music is based there (ok, a culture-specific assumption, but usually it works). Next we associate those sounds with numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 or else Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do. Once they get the idea of moving the scale around with 1 as the starting point (yes, "moveable do" only), then we start spelling in the key of C major, and noticing that major scales fall into a w-w-h-w-w-w-h pattern. And then it's easy to move to other keys.

So much better than "every good boy does fine". Infinitely better.

Folks who haven't had instruction in sightreading often make the mistake of beginning with fingerboard mechanics instead of the sound (OK, that's a D and the D is played here and that's an F# and it's there. . . .). For that matter, there are plenty of musicians who studied instrumental methods the same way -- especially in the classical world there's no shortage of methods that teach reading through finger mechanics. It's not a bad idea, if balanced by an ear-first approach.

I bet an early emphasis on the sight singing makes for a better musician overall, as well as a better reader.

If you can hear intervals, it's a short step to envisioning them on the fingerboard.

Interval training also helps with hearing chord changes in a jam situation. I have piano playing friends who help me with this, and it really makes a difference.

[Beanzy]

Yep I had a frame I slotted card stave blanking bars into, but now I've given up going to the trouble of buying books with unnecessary clutter and distractions on a page. If there's Tablature that's fine, but if it's mixed in with the standard notation on the same page I don't buy them any more. Visually it's like reading two language subtitles, because I sight read both the eye just slips between them and gets distracted. Opposite pages or top and bottom of the page would be much better to read, but best of all is if the tab isn't there taking up valuable printed page space in the first place. I'd rather get full value from the books I pay for and except for rare cases where it can be more useful (cross picking illustrations etc) I feel like I'm paying for fluff and clutter with those dual format books.

[DavidKOS]

Masking tape! I kid you not.

Yep I had a frame I slotted card stave blanking bars into, but now I've given up going to the trouble of buying books with unnecessary clutter and distractions on a page. If there's Tablature that's fine, but if it's mixed in with the standard notation on the same page I don't buy them any more.

I'll try some of those ideas.

[catmandu2]

Lets not define the argument by the outliers and esoteric. Lets not abandon something because it doesn't do everything everyone wants it to do.

Since about, what, the 40s or 50s - and Stockhausen (electroacoustics, Gesang der Jünglinge [the manuscripts never being collated into a "score"] - samples, sine waves, noise, mixed forms, an aural palette encompassing "tone-noise continuum," and "continuum of sense-nonsense"), modernism had exceeded the capacity of SN. The traditions affiliated with SN continue to be robust, of course.

The elucidation of Stockhausen's process with "Gesang der Jünglinge" is interesting - incuded here are some excerpts and examples from Stockhausen’s notes to the CD:

http://music.columbia.edu/masterpiec...ndAnalysis.pdf

[objectsession]

Hmm. In case it wasn't clear, my examples above (the Johnson and Barlow pieces) are examples of pieces with scores that are not playable or hearable - I'd call pieces that can't be played or heard "esoteric" as JeffD did. (Celestial Music for Imaginary Trumpets is written in staff notation. I don't think Stochroma is, but I'm not sure.)

But as for pieces that can't properly be presented with staff notation, I wouldn't be comfortable at all with calling them outliers or esoteric. Those are entire genres in both classical and popular music and, like catmandu2 said, those aren't exactly new (well, it's all relative - but it's about as old as bluegrass music).

[August Watters]

best of all is if the tab isn't there taking up valuable printed page space in the first place.

Yes - that was the real issue. ECM would have been impossible if it included tablature, mainly because of space limitations. But it’s an interesting question: why would anyone expect a classical mandolin book to include tablature, when virtually all the music is written in SN? When in Rome. . . .

[David Lewis]

Actually, I don't even know if that's true in practice. I think the Tom Johnson piece needs a sampling rate of millions of Hz. For the Clarence Barlow piece, the synth would have to run for billions of years.

That pleases me. These things should exist and be impossible.

[JeffD]

Hmm. In case it wasn't clear, my examples above (the Johnson and Barlow pieces) are examples of pieces with scores that are not playable or hearable - I'd call pieces that can't be played or heard "esoteric" as JeffD did. (Celestial Music for Imaginary Trumpets is written in staff notation. I don't think Stochroma is, but I'm not sure.)

But as for pieces that can't properly be presented with staff notation, I wouldn't be comfortable at all with calling them outliers or esoteric. Those are entire genres in both classical and popular music and, like catmandu2 said, those aren't exactly new (well, it's all relative - but it's about as old as bluegrass music).

I don't know what pieces you are referring to, but I am going to guess they are more rare than the mandolin is.

[catmandu2]

I don't know what pieces you are referring to, but I am going to guess they are more rare than the mandolin is.

I guess this is why discussions here never seem to get anywhere - seems like people are only interested in affirmation of what they believe, and disregard the rest ..

Maybe it would be better if we just put it into simpler terms: as Leslie Nielsen's character said in the 1975 episode "Identity Crisis" of the series "Columbo" - why all the jazz..?

[Tom Wright]

There are no disadvantages to standard notation. That not all information can be captured by it is a trivial observation. The map is not the territory but it sure is better to have a map than not, in my experience.

As to whether players should be readers, stories also existed without written language but I doubt there is much controversy over being literate.

[catmandu2]

There are no disadvantages to standard notation...

Were you to include the caveat, "...in the music that (you) play," then I could agree with your entire post.

Still (in some music that I play), there is good reason for aural/oral basis .. not that SN would be a disadvantage , per se, only inefficacious (unless I wanted to use it as I could - which would be to my advantage).

*For expediency, I'll try to anticipate what the "argument" was - and I'll have to go back and read the thread from the beginning - my entrée was only late and in response to specific posts. FWIW, I suspect that (the thread) is discussing Western/European music (?). My study of non-western forms probably isn't relevant to this discussion (SN can be helpful in other forms in approximation, but incomplete .. nonetheless, exemplifying again why SN is so elegant a system).

My view - obvious as it is - is simply that SN - being essentially associated with a particular form of musical enterprise and era - a quite vigorous one of course - will always exist, as long as the music is played. As new forms emerge, other choices will avail - perhaps, or perhaps not, relegating SN tradition to a lesser role.

[tkdboyd]

Yes - that was the real issue. ECM would have been impossible if it included tablature, mainly because of space limitations. But it’s an interesting question: why would anyone expect a classical mandolin book to include tablature, when virtually all the music is written in SN? When in Rome. . . .

I do appreciate that ECM came out without tab, for the reason you and others state, it is becoming more the usual only to have tab or notation. I will admit that when Tab is in front of me, my eyes gravitate that direction, but I would use both tab and notation to understand the piece I was working on. I have to admit, that modern tab has gotten really good at adding timing and other specifics normally found in SN. It is a sad state for myself, but one I hope to cure in the near future. Was able to get some fantastic advice from Will Patton this past week regarding intervals, vocalizing intervals, etc...I fancy myself a player of classical music, but unfortunately I rely on the layman's Tablature for much of it.

[foldedpath]

There are no disadvantages to standard notation. That not all information can be captured by it is a trivial observation. The map is not the territory but it sure is better to have a map than not, in my experience.

There is one disadvantage I've seen, and that's not the fault of SN itself. Sometimes students -- especially fiddlers -- are taught SN in a Folk idiom like Irish traditional music, where SN is valued as a learning tool, but not intended to be the final word on how the music is played in groups. The danger is that they can have trouble then moving off the page and playing by ear, which is the next natural step in the progression of playing this music.

I've seen it happen in a local fiddle class, taught by a very good violinist. He's Classically trained, but a decent trad player. There is a regular group of students he's been teaching for years, and he's tried to move them off the sheet music. It just hasn't worked. They only feel comfortable with a small forest of music stands in front of them. They have actually performed in public that way... at local events like St. Patrick's Day parties, taking about as much time to set up and tear down their music stands as they spend actually playing.

It sounds dreadful when they play, even after years of taking this regular class. They're too focused on reading and not getting inside the music by ear. They'll never be able to join a local ITM pub session, because they can't break away from the dots.

Again, it's not the fault of SN, but I wonder if maybe this amateur fiddle class would be in a different place if the teacher hadn't introduced SN at all, and just started with ear learning from the get-go.

[Beanzy]

It sounds dreadful when they play, even after years of taking this regular class. They're too focused on reading and not getting inside the music by ear. They'll never be able to join a local ITM pub session, because they can't break away from the dots.

Again, it's not the fault of SN, but I wonder if maybe this amateur fiddle class would be in a different place if the teacher hadn't introduced SN at all, and just started with ear learning from the get-go.

In my experience this is where the Jazz guys get it right and is something for all amateur groups using any notation to get sorted out.
It's a great way to get quick access to the music, to short-cut the learning phase, but you need to go beyond the printed page as soon as you can.
Speaking of amateur groups, I've seen several ways community orchestras do this, but none I've seen are completely successful.

The strongest contender so far is to teach the tune first then hand the sheets out at the end of the rehearsal for home practice, but the next rehearsal you just get all the eyes down again and you've thrown away the advantage of quickly accessing the piece for that first rehearsal.

There's a conundrum to resolve here, in that you need to teach people why they're trying to move beyond the page and how to practice to do that, but most amateur groups have players of basic to intermediate skill levels and just need to get them playing through the pieces together as quickly and efficiently as possible. Time for training of the ear / memory is limited and the skill and experience isn't there. Groups that have been playing together for years tend to be better able to move on as they are familiar with the repertoire so probably are only dipping in to the dots from habit.

Another factor there is that the repertoire is often alien territory for many so it's an extra layer of learning they're trying to get on top of mastering their instrument.

Group leaders need to encourage home and section practice to include moving on from the dots so people are free to listen closer and internalise the pieces. But practice time for most amateurs is really limited and rarely high quality, if you can get them to practice at all.

The other thing is amateur players can often spread themselves too thin in terms of joining several groups for social reasons, and having scores allows this as they can flit from one to the other without having to internalise a huge volume of material. It's well worth pushing the "moving off the dots" issue for any group though as once people are playing from their memory they naturally listen out for the cues and memory triggers provided by other parts & that means they're listening to the group.

[Randi Gormley]

Moving away from SN is a leap of faith, at least for the group of amateur ITM-ers I play with. Most people feel the exact notes are the only way to play a piece and they're terrified of playing a wrong note and, I dunno, blowing up some local bridge. We've had all sorts of arguments over whether the specific version we've decided on is the one played in sessions and whether a C or C# is the correct note in a given phrase. If you want, that's a disadvantage of SN -- too slavish a dedication to what the notes say in an idiom that ought to be more fluid. Of course, I've never heard this discussion when I play classical, where devotion to the printed notes is pretty much SOP.

I'll admit I've had a lot of fun reading this very extensive discussion; some I agree with, some not; f'rinstance, I've always thought that Airy (?) sheet music was a musician's joke and never meant to be actually played, sort of like reading a story in the Onion -- so true but so bogus, if you get my drift. I've also caught a glance at a PDQ Bach score, which contains SN along with directions to release balloons and spin bicycle wheels ... I also have serious doubts about SN disappearing, even further out than four or five generations. I learned how to read medieval music manuscripts in college so I could sing it as part of an a capella group back when I still had a singing voice. I can see SN joined by other ways to designate sounds but I don't see it disappearing any more than texting eliminated other written communication forms. Most stuff is not an 'either/or' proposition. It's much less defined and messier than that. fwiw.

[JeffD]

I guess this is why discussions here never seem to get anywhere - seems like people are only interested in affirmation of what they believe, and disregard the rest ..

Not at all. But we are not having a scientific discussion, where each and every counter example, by itself, nullifies the hypothesis.

We are talking in general terms about the music that is familiar and likely to be encountered by most of the participants, using words and phrases as familiarly meant to the participants, in an effort to be helpful and relevant to the honest questions involved. That there might be special, esoteric, outlander cases where-by the veracity of given point may be questioned - seems to me to be an attempt to win an argument, not an attempt to sort out a confusing situation in answer to an honest question.

[catmandu2]

Not at all. But we are not having a scientific discussion, where each and every counter example, by itself, nullifies the hypothesis.

We are talking in general terms about the music that is familiar and likely to be encountered by most of the participants, using words and phrases as familiarly meant to the participants, in an effort to be helpful and relevant to the honest questions involved. That there might be special, esoteric, outlander cases where-by the veracity of given point may be questioned - seems to me to be an attempt to win an argument, not an attempt to sort out a confusing situation in answer to an honest question.

In order to have a meaningful discourse, we have to be willing to look at the examples provided.

There are worlds beyond the familiar .

I'm not sure what the basic "argument" or hypothesis was, in this thread, but the couple of refutations I (and several others ahead of me) provided to the couple of platitudinal statements that I thought were worthy of reconsideration - with no acknowledgement of any kind - seems fairly typical of discourse here .

Anyway, just my thoughts

[catmandu2]

That there might be special, esoteric, outlander cases ...

Is there an appreciation of the extent to which works like Stockhausen"s (as above) and others have influenced or otherwise served to establish new - and popular - dimensions in music? I'm thinking this might be a rather significant point, going unawares ..

While most folks might hold a general perception that works by such composers as these (Stockhausen, et al.) are far afield and without relevance, this would be profound underestimation of their influences.

[objectsession]

Electronic music has a very strong presence in popular culture. A lot of electronic music can be represented in standard staff notation in a useful way, but a lot also cannot. (Examples of what I mean by "useful" or "not useful" - a keyboard part for a synth with pitch notes, pitch bends, and maybe some simple timbral indications could be useful for a performer. In contrast, a long single pitch drone with lots of varying effects could be notated as a single note, but that's not useful to understanding the piece or how it's played.)

Anyway, one popular use of electronic music is in movie scores. For example, The Hunger Games was the 9th highest grossing film in 2012 (3rd in the US) and uses the piece Sediment by Laurie Spiegel. The score for Gone Girl (which earned more than $300 million) by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross was also mostly electronic - yes, parts could be notated and be actually useful (I think it actually was to be played by acoustic instruments) but other instrumental parts are totally non-notatable. Check out this video (might need to be subscribed to Apple Music) to see how parts of At Risk were performed. And there are many more examples - those are just two that come to mind.

And speaking of Trent Reznor, his album The Downward Spiral sold over 4 million copies in the US alone. That's also a largely electronic album (although in style resembling a rock band) and a lot of those synth parts (and some acoustic parts, e.g., the humming part played on saxaphone mouthpiece in the intro to Eraser) can't be notated either. The Beatles' white album has Revolution 9 (and that's just the most obvious Beatles example).

I don't know if most people on this forum have heard those examples. But I don't know if most people have heard Bill Monroe or Nickel Creek or Vivaldi either. Those examples wouldn't be called out, it seems to me, because "what most people have heard" is actually a stand in for "normal music." Since you're not actually polling people to find out what music they listen to, you are basing that idea of "normal music" on what you envision as a "normal person" on this message board. Furthermore, even if something is uncommon, you're still dismissing the experiences of those who have those uncommon experiences. Personally, I find that all very offensive.

[Joel Glassman]

if you can't whistle it, you can't play it. If you can't remember how it goes, you can't play it. There are a lot of ways to learn how it goes and get it into your psyche.
f-d

This actually isn't true. I know classical musicians who can sight read music and play it with soul and personal phrasing. Sight reading like this isn't the approach of most people here. Its completely valid for one to play music they can't whistle or remember.

[catmandu2]

Yeah objectssn - my first thought about Stockhausen and popularism was George Martin who was putting that concrete-electro sonic fabric together early on ..

Yes I know when it gets down to it it can be discussed on all the usual sociocutural referrants and associations - the de rigueur this v that thing .. and rather than viewing of its own overt terms, etc. ... but I hope everyone can acknowledge just how profoundly pop has affected and effected the broader "society." Uhh.. It's a rock'n roll world baby!

[Beanzy]

What I'm not clear about is whether anyone discussing these esoteric examples considers them illustrative of advantages or disadvantages of notation.

My take is that such examples where the composer chooses to use alternatives reveal one of the core advantages of notation in that it doesn't lock everything down and leaves so much room for both player and composer to express and experiment. This is contrary to what is believed by a lot of people who don't frequently use notational systems.

[Paleosporin]

Interesting. I just skimmed the thread, so forgive my intrusion.

I recently finished Anna Maria Busse Berger's Medieval Music and the Art of Memory, in which the author spends a lot of time reevaluating the role of literacy in the medieval church. She posits that the role of texts and musical notation was principally to aid memorization rather than to free the individual from having to remember something, and that the way that mastery in memory was demonstrated was through skillful manipulation of the source material. Those crafty monks would do things like recite a poem from memory and then recite it backwards, rearrange the syllables of individual sentences, apply remembered verses to their own writing, or in music, apply different rhythmic modes to the same melody (in its extremity, resulting in the isorhythmic motet), sing a cantus firmus in retrograde (which resulted in the canon cancrizans), and improvise discant based on memorized tables of neumes that correspond to every possible note progression in the cantus firmus (sort of like having a bag of memorized licks for every pair of chords).

The visual component of the written word, versification, tables, tree diagrams, other graphic representations, all served to populate the memory palace so that the practitioner could recall information in great detail and manipulate it as they needed it. You probably remember your multiplication tables from elementary school. Same sort of thing. Apparently, professional chess players memorize moves and strategies in much the same way so that plays become immediate and automatic (I'm taking her word for it; I only play casually). Notation was not seen as an impediment upon orality, but rather a way to enhance the singer's memory and ability both to recall tunes and improvise upon them. Busse Berger points out that many elements of mensural notation (mensural rhythms, ficta) are vague and potentially open to multiple interpretations (a longa can be split into either two or three breves depending on the prolation, for instance). I can't help but to think of the inherently vague notation of Real Book heads, where a measure full of quarter notes will never be played as straight quarter notes unless the player is completely uninformed.

Also, it's not the composer's fault that the audience has a stick up its collective ass. I've never had any problem jamming out to Mahler in the concert hall, though I get some funny looks on occasion. (~12:20-14:40 in the video in the OP.)

[catmandu2]

Those crafty monks would do things like recite a poem from memory and then recite it backwards, rearrange the syllables of individual sentences, apply remembered verses to their own writing, or in music, apply different rhythmic modes to the same melody (in its extremity, resulting in the isorhythmic motet), sing a cantus firmus in retrograde (which resulted in the canon cancrizans), and improvise discant based on memorized tables of neumes that correspond to every possible note progression in the cantus firmus (sort of like having a bag of memorized licks for every pair of chords).

The visual component of the written word, versification, tables, tree diagrams, other graphic representations, all served to populate ... so that the practitioner could recall information in great detail and manipulate it as they needed it...

The worlds of tabulatures are fascinating. The ap Huw manuscript that I'm playing from contains such examples as these ... it's among the reasons I love to play the music - very stimulating in the ways that the (simple) repetitive figures are manipulated - here's an example:



I'm aware of only a few interpretations of this particular manuscript thus far - each widely varied..