In the first half of the course, we surveyed the history of acoustic media from the gramophone to the computer. Starting today, we shift our attention to older music technologies. Indeed, despite Kittler's audacious and half-serious claim in Gramophone Film Typewriter, Edison did not "invent invention" [1], much less invent the invention of sound media. First, someone had to invent the idea of musical inscription itself. In my account, the credit for that discovery goes to two ancient Greeks, one legendary, the other whose name is lost in the sea of time. In the 6th century BC, the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras discovered the elegant integer ratios that represent consonant harmonies: 2:1 for the octave, 3:2 for the perfect fifth, and 4:3 for the perfect fourth. These ancient numbers are the first sound recordings we possess, and, as we shall see, for thousands of years they bound the fate of Western music to the fate of measurement itself. In the same century that Pythagoras invented harmony and music's representation in number, a now-forgotten ancient Greek rearranged his alphabet to represent melody—that is, the steps of scales. Musical numbers for harmony, musical letters for melody: the technologies that we continue to borrow from the Greeks are so ubiquitous that we may forget they're technologies at all, and not simply self-evident facts. We have inherited the ancient Greek division of labor between a numerical tuning theory, which puts musical pitches in their place, and a conventional notation that shows which pitches to play, and when.
| [1] | GFT, Introduction, 14 |
Such an inheritance, however, is ours only if we want it. The facts of the score are up for grabs at any moment, and we may expand or reduce them however we please. Of course, we may be more faithful to the ideal of musical measurement than the Greeks themselves. We may interpret the history of notation as the progress of ever-more-precise musical measurements, perhaps leading up to Stockhausen's "Studie II," in which numbers account not only for pitch and rhythm, but also for timbre and dynamics. On the other hand, we may dismiss measurement completely. A score like Earle Brown's "December 1952" reminds us that notation can do more, and less, than measure acoustic parameters. In the light of these extreme examples, a new compositional responsibility emerges: we must decide for ourselves what we want notation to be.
It turns out that we are hardly the first to deal with the problem of finding "the right" notation. Experimental notation is not a post-war development; to the contrary, it is present throughout notation's history. As musical techniques, instruments, and priorities change from one generation to the next, notation follows suit. But the reverse is also true: the logic of symbols exerts its own influence on music, pushing it in unexpected directions. In the words of Saussure:
What has escaped philosophers and logicians is that from the moment a system of symbols becomes independent of the objects designated it is itself subject to undergoing displacements that are incalculable for the logician. [2]
| [2] | Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique génerale, Edition Critique, ed. by Rudolf Engler, Vol. 2 (Wiesbaden, Harrasowitz, 1967-74), p. 23. English translation quoted from Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 426. |
We devote the second half of the course to these histories of notation's symbols and material. While the material is new, our methodology and focus remain the same. Our study breaks into three parts, each of which lasts a couple weeks. In the first part, we give a broad overview of notation, to explain how the technology has changed throughout its history. As usual, we are particularly interested in moments of rupture, change, and conflict. We want to show you that different styles and interpretations of music notation have always coexisted, and that, at least occasionally, notation has undergone radical transformations at the hands of composers.
Yet notation does not exist simply on its own terms, or the terms of those who use it; its abstractions are always bound to the concrete realities of the objects and processes it represents. After our general overview, we hone in on two of these abstractions, to explore the relationship between notation and the other media, technological or otherwise, that define its content. In the second part, we focus on pitch representation, to understand how the meaning of "pitch" has evolved alongside pitch-measuring instruments: first the voice and monochord, then keyboards, then instruments capable of precise frequency measurements. Finally, in the third part, we explore time representation, which is likewise conditioned by time-keeping devices: the pendulum, clocks, metronome, and so on.
Why shift focus to music notation? And why present notation after acoustic media, not before? Both questions have the same answer: the role of notation in composition is one of the central problems facing composers today, and it is a technological problem as much as a conceptual one. Before the development of acoustic media, it was unclear that music notation was a technology at all, because it was unclear that music could be stored in any way other than symbols. 150 years ago, the score was de facto the privileged compositional document, because it was the only compositional document. Notation was the essence of musical documentation. With recordings, of course, that is no longer the case; what Kittler calls the "monopoly of writing" [3] has been broken. But this does not mean that recordings simply take the place of notation; as we hope you have seen in your composition and analysis assignments, scores and recordings record different information in different ways. In cases that are less extreme or unusual than you might think, they are incompatible. Recordings do not take the place of notation, nor do they duplicate it. Our challenge, then, is not to think about recordings in the way people used to think about notation, but rather the opposite: to reconsider notation in the light of recordings; to extend our eccentric history of sound technology backwards, to rediscover the strangeness and flexibility in the tools we use to write music.
| [3] | GFT, Introduction, 9. |
In short, we want to prove to you that technology has always been a problem in composition. It is not only a problem for today's adherents of sonorous electricity. It was just as much of a problem for the Greeks of yore, for wigged and powdered Europeans, for anyone throughout history who has ever read or written musical symbols. Music technology is not opposed to the conventional history of music, and you cannot escape it by studying Bach and Beethoven. Their work is no less technological than our own. So: we will continue to study experimental music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but we will start to incorporate the experimental and canonic work of the past as well.