> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nelson Zink [mailto:zink@newmex.com]=20
> Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2002 11:05 PM
> To: Shakuhachi@communication.ucsd.edu
> Subject: RE : Music as Language
>
>
> Bruno,
>
> > They of course conceive of pitches which a fingering
> > on the shakuhachi can give, but not necessarily notes.
>
> If I understand your concern, it has more to do with music notation
> rather than the music (sound) itself. You're making the point that
> Japanese and Europeans notated differently--Japanese notation being
> closer to literal instructions of how to play the flute. Which hole,
> which finger and so on--kind of like the books for those beginning to
> play the recorder. European notation, however, is more abstract--one
> needs to learn to 'read' music which requires a passing familiarity with
> certain musical concepts--octave, scale, notes and so on.
This is not quite right, I think, and for interesting reasons.
In western music two basic kinds of musical notation are distinguished:
pitch notation, and tablature. The latter is what appears in books for
those beginning to play the recorder. It is also what appears above the
staves of printed pop music so that guitarists can accompany the songs.
The notations look almost nothing like each other, and that is just the
point of a tablature: it is a notation tailored to each musical
instrument, to give the player directions what to do with his/her
fingers (and perhaps other body parts!) in order to produce the sounds
-- specifically, the pitches -- required by the music.
Tablatures came on the scene rather late; the earliest music notations
were intended as aids to memory -- to prompt someone to recall how a
piece of music with which he or she was already familiar (by hearing
someone perform it, and perhaps by imitating it) sounded. These pieces
of music were generally vocal, not instrumental, though of course the
distinction is rather an artificial one, since an instrumentalist can
remember how a piece of music sounds and then produce those sounds (or
at least their pitches) with the instrument.
This is, in a sense, just what a singer cannot do: intentionally modify
the tensions of the vocal folds in order to produce one or another
pitch. A singer simply hears or remembers a pitch, and then produces it
... somehow (this is still quite mysterious). So pitch notation -- the
former mentioned above -- is really, in the first instance, singers'
notation.
But it is also extremely useful to other musicians, just because it
*does* indicate only the pitches (and, depending on the elaboration of
the notation, other features like duration and loudness) and thus is not
specific to any particular instrument: pitch notation becomes the
*lingua franca* of musical notation, readable by singers and
instrumentalists alike, while tablatures are *dialects* (as it were) of
notation known only to those who play particular instruments or make a
special study of the notation for other reasons.
Even that is not quite the situation, of course, since someone who is
very familiar with a tablature (whether he or she actually plays the
instrument for which it is the notation or not) can "hear" in
imagination the pitches notated in that tablature without actually
moving the body parts in such-and-such a way to produce them. So the
distinction between pitch notation and tablature ultimately collapses.
The question to ask about a notation is this: how good a rendition of a
piece of music can be produced by someone who is familiar with the
system of its notation but is *not* already familiar with the piece of
music at the notation for which he or she is looking? Equivalently, how
many of the details of a performance of a piece of music are not (or
cannot be) notated? (I'm leaving aside here the very large element of
improvisation, personal variations to the rendition, etc.) From my
observation, printed shakuhachi music (which is a kind of solfeggio with
other indications -- many now borrowed from western notations, it seems)
is perhaps less informative than western musical notation. I hasten to
add that this is not casting aspersions upon the notation: it is often
*desirable* not to try to notate particular features of a performance,
for reasons that have often been discussed on this list.
It's worth noting that apart from recorder and guitar tablatures, there
are still some others in regular use: lutenists, for instance --
espcially those who play the baroque instrument, which has many more
strings than its renaissance predecessors -- still prefer the tablature
for their instrument; it's actually easier for them to read than pitch
notation. There used to be keyboard tablatures (fascinating to look at),
but as far as I know, these have fallen out of use, except when some
version is revived or invented for a special purpose.
Apologies for this over-long post, and if I'm being redundant -- I read
the daily digest of the list, and sometimes don't take everything in.
Windsor Viney
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
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