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eftychia at 08:00am on 2005-05-07A tangential answer to questions I asked in an
early-music newsgroup about notation for
viola da gamba
The answer turns out to be that just as C-clef on this
line is "tenor clef" and on that line is "alto clef", etc.,
if the G-clef is on the bottom line it's called "French
violin clef", and there's a name for F-clef on the top
line and a couple more names for different placements of
a C-clef. This implies that the answer to a question
I'd wondered about in the past, "Can I move the G- and
F-clefs in current modern notation, or is that only kosher
for 16th Century scores
(Why would I want to move the clef? For the same reason my ancestors did and C-clef instruments still do: I hate ledger lines. Of course, being a guitarist, I'm going to get ledger lines someplace no matter where I put whatever clef and what '8va' mark I throw in, but boy was I wishing I could move the clef on those alto recorder parts last night that kept going higher than the soprano parts!)
Creeping gradually to the point of this entry ...
I know there's a big overlap between
mathemagticians and musicians,
but I feel extra math-weenie-ish -- or is it more of
a programmer thing? -- for still not thinking
of them as nine distinct clefs, but as three
clefs / clef-symbols, which can be placed on any line.
It seems more ... well, more mathematical that way. More
logical, more pattern-based, less abitrary-memorization-based.
That is, I've got three symbols and a simple rule for interpreting them: the shape tells me what note the clef identifies the location of, and the position specifies that location. Three symbols and a rule -- not much to remember! And it's not like moving the clefs gets in the way of sight-reading from Arbeau, right? (Uh, right? Or is it just that only the folks who "got used to it pretty quickly" have bothered to mention it much?) This is exactly what happens with the "remember the different names" approach, just without bothering to remember the names. It's still what the clefs mean whichever way you learn them.
My approach here does not strike me as especially clever, it's just that I find myself wondering why, if so many musicians are mathematically inclined, they haven't taken the lazy-mathematician approach.
Of course the fly in this ointment is that I still have to keep track of "these singers will get confused unless I put the clef here, those singers will get confused unless I put the clef there, this instrument wants it on this line," etc. (Note that it still saves me the step -- except in vocal parts, where it's obvious -- of remembering which instrument takes what clef-by-name.) But the solution to that (*ahem*) is simply to go back to expecting folks to be able to deal with the clefs moving (this is more common in Europe than the US?) ... and for the composer/arranger to choose sensibly to minimize ledger lines. :-)
[1] The direct answers were that bass gamba is written at pitch in either F-clef or C-clef (but gambists can be expected to read G-clef and play it an octave down, as well); and that double-bass has been written an octave higher than it's played for as long as folks have been writing for it (I wasn't sure if that was a later adaptation or went all the way back).
[2] I don't know whether music scholars count Arbeau's notation in Orchesographie as "modern" or "almost modern" notation, but I think of it as modern notation because the symbols and their meanings are congruent to the symbols currently in use (change diamond note heads to round and cut the time values in half and you're pretty much there), it's a five-line staff, and he uses bar lines -- in other words, I didn't learn a new notation system to read it; I just got used to "looks funny", just as Shakespeare and the King James Bible are Modern English. (Though if I understand correctly, bar lines weren't in common usage -- Arbeau threw them in to make it easier to line up the dance instructions to the music ... have I got that right?)
Driving home from rehearsal thinking about all this, it struck me a) how dense the information content of musical notation is, b) how most of it is very simple with most of the complexity being from the juxtaposition of so many simple encodings of different things onto the same space, and c) how redundancy helps legibility (e.g. optionally using horizontal space to indicate time to make the note-shape encoding of time easier to read).
I think of "reading music" in the sense of "deciphering the information represented on the page" as being easy, though I'll concede that sight-reading quickly and accurately is a harder skill. This fits with my perception of it as several very simple systems overlaid; no one step is (usually) tricky or complex to interpret. It also fits with the just-mentioned difference between "I can make sense of this" and "I can interpret and execute this on the fly": the layering of so many simple encodings means that simultaneously decoding all of them -- while playing and ideally also interpreting and nuancing -- adds up to a more difficult task.
(FWIW, my sight-reading is nowhere near as good as I'd like it to be. Maybe if I regularly got around to practicing sight-reading, I could fix that. Not that I ever expect to catch up to some of my friends in that department.)
There's a phenomenon I haven't gotten to make sense to me yet despite my observations so far: musicians who can read music but not write it. (I think I've babbled about this here before.) I've had several people who read music tell me they can't write it, and some have been surprised and impressed that I can do so. This confuses me: since I can read music, it makes sense to me that anything I can play, I can write down (with the caveat that unusual rhythms can take me a (possibly long) while to figure out how to notate). The idea of not being able to reverse the reading process confuses me, since all the information about the encoding system already has to be present, though I'm sure that I'll eventually see what the obstacle is. I won't be surpried if it turns out to be entirely a matter of self-confidence and a willingness to choose from multiple correct options ... but neither will I be surprised if it turns out to be some cognitive leap I didn't notice having taken. Until I figure it out, I'm perplexed by the phenomenon.
The folks I've mentioned this to who can write music haven't seemed to find the writing ability special, so it's probably not just me who doesn't get this.
And then there's the funny-feeling-in-the-head that comes from taking a tune you know on one instrument, say a guitar, but not really "by ear" so much as "in the fingers", and trying to play it on another instrument (say, a recorder) without sheet music, by remembering how the guitar finger motions feel and translating those rememered sensations into recorder fingerings on the fly. When it doesn't work, it becomes obvious how messed-up trying to do that is. When it does work, it makes one's hands and the inside of one's skull feel really, really strange.
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When you talk about people who can read music but not write it, are you talking about composing or transcription? In my case, I can read music, but writing it is a very slow process--my memory for sounds is quite poor while the text-to-fingers connection is pretty good. I think of musical instruments as tools for supplying pitch accuracy that I can't reliably do mentally.
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What I regularly get, also, is a certain amount of faint disdain from the orchestra about sight-reading. (I'm a singer.) That mostly evaporates when I show them a vocal line and say "Sing or whistle this for me," and they say "Let me get my bassoon," and I say "No." And then they realize that being able to map written notes to fingerings is different from being able to hear the melody in your head from the written notes. And then I feel faintly superior. Not that this is at all relevant to your post.
maybe it depends on what you learn first
i started on clarinet and boys choir so i saw only treble clef "in action" for most of my life. i can only read bass when i'm reading a full score, or at least SATB parts in a choir hymnal / "arrainged for piano" part. that is, i can read bass when the treble clef is with it.
now that i'm on irish whistles, most of my practice has had little to do with sheet music, but instead figuring out just from hearing it what key a piece is in so i can pull out the right whistle (and or get the right accidentals) to play along. hopefully, i can extend that exercise into my bazouki playing which also currently suffers in that i can't figure out by ear the exact chords being played by others.
i have an incredible instinct for relative pitch, and a perfect pitch memory for recalling recorded works, but i could never connect those two dots into "this pitch is an A". with concentration, i can figure out "this tune is in G and that's the tonic", but its work and not the instantanious reaction that a perfect-pitch person has. i certainly can't go "AAAAA" when someone says "gimme an A" unless i can get a tune in my head that i know is in A or G and sing up to it from the tonic and be correct...but that's where the perfect memory of the tune and a little analysis comes into play, and that's not "perfect pitch" in the same sense.
*sigh*
in the end, i will always be a better music listener than player, no matter what i do. that was a built-in instinct well-developed over all 3 decades of my life.
Re: maybe it depends on what you learn first
Re: maybe it depends on what you learn first
Re: maybe it depends on what you learn first
Re: maybe it depends on what you learn first
I think I also developed a 2nd means of identifying pitches in orchestral music, which came from hearing the resonances of open strings and mapping from there. (Since not all orchestras tune to A-440 -- modern orchestras sometimes higher, early music often lower -- this can conflict with my fixed reference. But it gives me the key the composer wrote the piece in.)
Quite likely there is some requisite innate ability that must be combined with learning to be able to name abstract pitches.
I have a theory that there are similarities between recognizing pitches and recognizing colors. Tone deafness corresponds to color blindness; recognizing pitches is like recognizing colors. Most people can hear higher/lower, and most can see bluer/redder. There are different forms of color blindness, and there may well be different forms of tone deafness, just waiting to be studied. We teach children the colors, but find that people describing specific objects may differ about exactly what colors they see. Most people don't have enough musical training to name the pitches they hear. But some cultures have languages with tonal components. Do these cultures have more people with perfect pitch, because pitch sensitivity is part of their basic communication? Do their people who are physiologically tone deaf have language-comprehension problems? (Or are they at a sufficient disadvantage to have reduced social options and reproductive success, and hence be a rarity?)
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if someone goes "a a g f# g b e b e" i have no problem dashing those onto a staff and then cleaning it up into notes. its slow, sometimes too tedious for the effort (especially as my musical handwriting is as bad as my cursive), but i can do it without any need to "concentrate" to at least get it down in the rough.
but that disconnect can come in other ways as well -- cyd can listen to spanish and translate it into english very efficiently, but she can't speak it.
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1) Most musicians aren't mathematically inclined. It works the other-way-around: a large percentage of mathematically inclined people are musicians. But there are vastly more musicians than mathematically inclined people.
2) Because there are two different sorts of musicians: those who play "perfect" instruments (the period term) and those who play the other kind.
"Perfect" here means "complete" or "whole" (not "flawless"), from the Latin "perfectum" (the last part of "perficio" meaning "to complete or end". Perfect instruments are the ones on which one can play chords: organ, harp, lute, etc. That is, you can play the whole work of music (melody and harmony) yourself. Imperfect instruments are those on which one can only play a melody (and maybe the occasional double-stop): winds, bowed strings, voice.
Musicians who play perfect instruments generally wind up with a more flexible, abstracted, three-dimensional view of music. AFAIK, we all think of it as "three clefs that move."
(Actually, many of us think of it as "One massive staff, with a redundant system of three clefs for telling you where you are on it.")
Musicians brought up on non-perfect instrument seem more likely to think of them as different clefs.
There's a phenomenon I haven't gotten to make sense to me yet despite my observations so far: musicians who can read music but not write it. (I think I've babbled about this here before.) I've had several people who read music tell me they can't write it, and some have been surprised and impressed that I can do so.
I would guess they have misunderstood the question. But maybe not. I am better than average at spelling, but for some reason, I can't do "reverse lookups on that table" very well -- I am the world's worst Scrabble player. I can't look at a group of letters and figure out what words could be made of them. At least not well. So I'm familiar with another unidirectional mental phenomenon.
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Arbeau uses barlines? Only in Bel Qui, I think. AFAIK, everywhere else, it's got section lines (which had been in use for at least 400 years) but no barlines.
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*whimper*
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On a whole other tangent, your comments mirror those I've made forever about my preferred vector graphics editing software (CorelDraw) vs. my least favorite (Adobe Illustrator). Corel's meme is to have one tool that handles all related functions (with some exceptions now, where there are two or three related tools in a toolbox flyout), and to have that tool switch its settings to handle the various directions of its functionality. Adobe, on the other hand, maintains sets of six and eight tools to do those functions. Clearly, I prefer the "one tool, six settings" meme, which neatly parallels the "three clefs, three locations" one you mention.
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On reading but not writing: as with any other language, parsing is easier than generation for most people. Just tonight this really struck me when someone asked me, in Hebrew, if I speak Hebrew, and while I understood perfectly what he had said, I was unable to formulate a proper reply. (I ended up saying "katan", which actually means "small", because I don't know how one would render "a little". I was working on "I understand (some) but don't speak", but couldn't conjure up the word for "understand". And so it goes. (Yes, I realize that technically, had I formed that response, it would have been a mis-statement, but I would have relied on the slow pidgin-Hebrew formulation to convey the reality. :-) ) )
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The clef symbols identified "middle" C, the F below, and the G above. I've seen multiple forms for the F and G; modern notation has one surviving form for each. They could be on any line of the staff, to suit the range of the part. (I've even seen clefs on spaces.) They can have octave shifts, usually indicated with a little 8/16/32 above or below the clef. (You might see a little 8 below the G (treble) clef of a modern tenor vocal part, but commonly now that is simply assumed and omitted.) Ledger lines were never used. (You'd have the space the staves farther apart, and you'd get less music on the page.) If the part ranged far enough, you'd have to use a new clef to keep the part on the staff. Generally you tried to do any clef shifting at the beginning of a staff. A custos ("direct") at the end of the preceding line served as a clue to what was coming.
As to ease of reading -- music notation is a language, and like any other language you (a) learn the rules and (b) practice applying them. We all learned the sounds of the letters of English (substitute your own native language here), then learned to combine sounds into syllables and words. With practice, we became fluent readers. Musically, I started out on the piano, and I became 'fluent' with treble and bass clefs. I simply recognize the meaning of notes on every line or space, and nearby ledger lines. If we commonly had floating clefs, instead of learning these fixed relationships, we would all learn to apply the relative-to-the-clef rule all the time -- it would simply be a part of the language we use. At one point I was teaching myself to read C-clef on the middle line. At first I was doing the relative translation for every note; then I was recognizing more and more notes by fixed positions, learning a 3rd clef. Learning to parse floating clefs on the fly would be much more powerful/flexible, but I simply don't encounter it in the music I see, so I don't get any practice at it. (But consider that we have time signatures and key signatures, and these affect the way we interpret each measure. They can change throughout the piece, and we apply these rules on the fly. We learn to do whatever is commonly required.) Writing music with these archaic rules will restrict the comprehensibility to a smaller audience, much as writing English with obscure vocabulary or foreign words would.
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musicians who can read music but not write it.
I wonder about that too. It's like being able to read, but not write, a verbal language. Part of it is, again, practice -- we have to learn to make the symbols. Letters or notes, making them accurately, consistently, and legibly takes practice. Music notation suffers from being much more tedious to write by hand, making it a real chore to say anything significant. Computer notation software has helped a lot there. (But that's yet another layer of language that requires proficiency.) Another part might be not having anything to say. I don't always have words worth writing; neither do people always have tunes worth writing. And if you have a tune, can you figure out the notes/intervals/durations/rests? This may be akin to figuring out the words to express your thoughts, and knowing how to spell them.
taking a tune you know on one instrument, say a guitar, but not really "by ear" so much as "in the fingers", and trying to play it on another instrument
I've got a weird parallel to that -- when I learn a tune by ear, I first have it as a series of notes; later, when I know it better, it becomes a series of intervals. Two distinct forms of internal representation, and usable in different ways.