Cook 4

"An Imaginary Object"

What is notation for?
-Conservation: "stop time in its tracks & give a stable, visual form" (51)
-Communication: from person to person, eg composer to performer
-Conception: how composers, performers, historians, etc think about music

Many societies have had a desire to preserve their culture, including music. One reason notation developed.

Notation only tells part of the story.
-Medieval chant: no tempo indication, no notes on vocal production, no exact pitch (53)
-"Modern" Western notation has similar issues: how to perform according to standards of when it was written?
-"Notation conserves music, then, but it conceals as much as it reveals" (55)

Notation represents SOUNDS and THINGS performers have to do to make sounds

Notation has meanings fixed by convention.

Example of a "thing" to do: una corda (56)

Tablature: describes what to do to make the sound (57)
-Guitar music
-Renaissance lute music
-Limited by only working for one instrument
--Cultures with many tabs have less sense of "overall musical tradition" (57)
--As in Chinese music, with qin, yangqin & pip music

Westerns generally associate tabs with "amateurs"
-Autoharp, guitarists who can't read notation
-Transfers to pop, jazz, etc tradition, because they aren't as based on notation as Western art music; is it part of the same tradition as Western classical music?

Western notation assumes that all instruments/music is based on the piano - distance between notes, each note is individual and separate
-Leads to controversies with ethnomusicologists who try to transcribe world music
--Can distort world music to Western standards
--Notation can easily distort Western music too (example of computerized performance & importance of performer) (59-60)

All notations miss out on something, simplify the music, otherwise it would be too complex to read & understand
-Depending on tradition: timbre, rhythm, etc.

Conservation is important, but not only function.
Communication important too.
Score sets up a way for us to think about music, "identifies certain attributes of music as essential" (62)
What is "given" in notation & what's up for interpretation defines a musical culture

Talking about music demands the use of metaphor, even just saying "higher" and "lower" pitch (70). Texture. A "piece" of music.

Notation shows music "moving," but it doesn't actually move. "When we say the music moves, we are treating it as an imaginary object" (70)

Paradox: we experience music in time, but to study, appreciate, manipulate, etc., we pull it out of time into notation.

As with paintings, we can "see" in music experiences. When we study music, we aren't just studying "it" but also ourselves, too.