Session for Week 5

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Session for Week 5

• Transcription Debate
• Music of Islam and Middle East
• Sudan, Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria,
  Afganistan (Islamic Traditions)

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Transcription

• The debate over use and methods of transcription
  has long been a major issue in ethnomusicology.
• It exemplifies the old insider/outsider
  phonemic/phonetic (emic/etic) problem.
• Phonemic importance to insider shades of
  meaning in small adjustments of language.
• Phonetic how perceived by the outsider.
  Bartoks transcriptions were phonetic but
  meaningless to the insider.

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Notation

• Not simply a visualisation of music but
  expresses cultural meaning only to those who are
  of that culture.
• all established systems of notation have
  developed in response to the particular
  requirements of the tradition they serve . each
  one of them is sufficient unto its purpose or,
  when it ceases to be, is modified or discarded in
  favor of an improved system.

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Origins

• Origins in formalised signalling systems of
  memorizing and teaching.
• Written notation limited to literate societies
  but conditioned by social context in that
  society. Motivation usually as an aide memore
  in performance and as means of communicating
  ideas about the music.
• Either descriptive or presciptive

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The symbols used

• Normally taken from some other existing system.
• Greeks first to use alphabet for instrumental
  pitches.
• Chinese used five monosyllables (written
  characters) to denote the notes of the pentatonic
  scale.
• Signs either phonic (already presentations of
  sound outside music) or graphic.

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Parameters

• Notation is perceived visually provides
  information corresponding to a musical entity
  unfolding over time. Different systems give
  different quantities of information per time
  unit.
• 4 basic parameters of music pitch, duration,
  loudness and timbre
• Many secondary ones which may be crucial for
  definition of style/genre.
• Each parameter may be represented and each needs
  some sort of division of scale or quantifiable
  unit.

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Western Notation

• Reflects its origins in Plainsong and Church
  usage.
• Developed for prescriptive purposes (to play
  from) it is also reasonable good for descriptive
  purposes (to realise what has been heard). But
  this is because we all have a good idea of what
  the symbols mean.
• However it emphasis the vertical structure as
  that is what Western music is mainly concerned
  with.

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Transcription and Ethnomusicology

• Until 70s all agreed it was very difficult but
  essential. Skills were practiced hard and highly
  developed basic primary skill of the
  ethnomusicologist of diagnostic and preservative
  purposes.
• Adapted Western notation with lots of
  diacriticals to move from prescriptive towards
  descriptive and give sense of style.
  Transposition to a tonality with as few
  accidentals as possible any combination of
  sharps and flats. Plus and minus arrows for
  micro-tones. Rhythmic groupings shown by
  irregular beaming and bar lines. Precise
  metronome markings important. Variants
  incorporated into stave. Text accompanied melody
  and with phonetic transcription of sound and
  philological commentary.

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The problem

• Hornborstals ideas followed through and
  rationalised by panel of experts 1949-50.
• Transcription in generation of Bartok, Herzog and
  Densmore became high art and produced
  transcriptions that have never been surpassed.
• However these transcriptions can never be played
  from and would be meaningless to native musicians
  even if they were musically literate.

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Disadvantages

• Using a mainly prescriptive form of notation for
  descriptive purposes.
• We single out structures and aspects in the music
  of other societies that resemble familiar
  structures/features in our music and write them
  down ignoring things for which we have no symbols
  or to which our ears are not sensitive.
• We expect the notation to be read by people who
  do not carry the tradition.
• Charles Seegar said To such a riot of
  subjectivity it is precocious indeed to ascribe
  the designation scientific.

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Seegars Melograph

• Produced in 1959 to give a three-fold
  photo-graphic display that incorporated 1.
  Pitch-time graph 2. Amplitude-time graph 3.
  Timbre-time graph.
• Meant to give more data and be objective
  culturally neutral.
• Gave the whole detailed musical event, whereas
  traditional notation does not differentiate
  between stages of musical event attack, decay
  etc.
• Highly efficient for melody but could not
  separate parts of polyphony.
• However little used does not distinguish what
  is significant.

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Problems

• Our hearing is only of a given competence and
  much of what the melograph records we do not
  register too detailed.
• Physiological aspects of hearing the brain has
  to interpret the signals and people hear and see
  what they expect to hear and see selective
  listening.
• We are influenced by our memories and musical
  syntax.
• Great difference between what an automatic
  transcriber would hear and an experienced
  listener of a particular idiom .

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New Notations

• Avante garde music tried to fix all elements of
  performance in ever more complex notation.
• Backlash against this set in with 60s
  experimentalism and free graphic score notations.
  
• In Ethnomusicology debate hotted up and all
  manner of approaches tried. Notations developed
  for specific genres.

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Hoods Ideas

• 1. Give original notation if there is one and
  learn to use it. Also give a translation of it.
• 2. Use of mechanical transcription for details
  of performance.
• 3. Have a universal system of manual
  transcription. Hood suggested a version of
  Labannotation

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Case for Using Western Notation

• Universal all Western trained musicians use it.
  
• Adaptable can be doctored and customised.
• Accurate enough for purpose does not show too
  much.
• But on each of the above it also fails

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Reids Suggestions

• 1. Suitability such that we do not get misled
  by apparatus of transcription.
• 2. Accuracy should aspire to this.
• 3. Flexibility account for variables in
  tradition.
• 4. Utility easy to use and quote.
• 5. Practicality use with photocopying and basic
  equipment
• 6. Cross-cultural applicability no ethnic bias
• 7. Universality intelligible to all after
  short time.

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Advent of Music Technology

• The great advances in recording technology have
  removed the basis for the primacy of
  transcription. Why do it at all when the music
  itself can be so available?
• Computers can now produce printouts based on
  digital process. Any extraction of musical
  parameters can be displayed in real time.
• However little desire to use this technology on
  the part of ethnomusicologists.

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Final Ideas

• 1. Transcription can never communicate music,
  but can communicate ideas about music.
• 2. It cannot give style as this must be done by
  performance but can be useful in discussing
  aspects of music if it visually represents those
  aspects.
• 3. As long as ethnomusicology is driven by
  academic (especially in USA) transcription will
  remain within the bounds of Western notation.