> Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 07:04:26 -0700
> From: edBeaty <edosan@boulder.net>
> To: Shakuhachi e-list <shakuhachi@communication.ucsd.edu>
> Subject: Shakuhachi and Koto tuning...
> Message-ID: <p06100300bdb138745819@[192.168.0.4]>
>
> This from David Wheeler:
[...]
> The problem with Japanese music notation (which makes non-concert
> pitch notation look like small potatoes) is the fact of dedicated
> notation, which has three musicians (eg. koto, shami, shaku) reading
> completely different notation systems, despite the fact that they are
> talking about the same pitches.
Such notations are called tablatures, in Western terminology. The one most commonly seen nowadays is for guitar (those little grid affairs with black dots on them, appearing above the staff in printed popular music, for example), but there used to be many others, including one for keyboard music which was very interesting, indeed. Apart from the guitar notation, the only tablature(s) still in common use by performers of Western classical music is (are), I believe, for the lute.
But it is not entirely clear, when one thinks about it, what the relation between notation and performance (with the resulting sounds) is. We think of Western staff notation as *not* being a tablature, but as somehow "directly" indicating the pitches (along with when they are to occur in time relative to each other, etc.) to someone who has learned the notation, not what the performer is to do (stop this or that string, or hole) to produce those pitches. But what a performer does, no matter what the instrument (this goes for singing, too), is see the notation, and then, from the learned and remembered repertoire of possibly complex movements (or memories, for the singer), *do* what is necessary to do to produce the notated pitch.
In some sense, pitch notation can be thought of as a *universal* tablature, requiring that each performer have learned, and thus know, what he or she has to do in order to make the correct sounds, with the (happy) result that all performers who have learned the notation can, just by looking at it, imagine ("hear in the mind") what pitches, etc., are intended.
But there's no impediment in principle to being able to imagine which pitches are intended by *any* sufficiently developed notation, so the distinction between a tablature and a pitch notation seems really to be more a matter of who has learned to read the notation (performers on one instrument only, or performers on several different ones), and of convenience (some notations will be more economical or easy to read, contain more "information", etc., than others).
Windsor Viney
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
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