Notation, Recording Technology and Musical Change

  Thanks to musical text and modern visual and audio technology, a musical action can be lifted out of time and made into a thing, occupying space as an object to be perused and re-animated. In this essay I wish to investigate the different modes of 'solidification' presented by graphic and sonic technologies, exploring the underlying natures of these two highly differing types of musical object: musical text and sound recording, and how they relate to concepts of performance and, significantly, improvisation.

   It is important to first address the role of graphic technologies of musical representation, which has been central to the concept of Western ‘art’ music since the earliest notational techniques were developed for use in religious choral music. The practice of graphic description or notation of melodies and music can be traced back to the cuneiform tablets of the middle-east from c. 2000 to 1000 BC, and there are probably many other earlier examples from ancient history for which we have no extant examples. In terms of musical history since the advent of Western notation and until the twentieth century, however, the relationship between text and performance has remained fairly stable, with works of ‘art’ music generally being composed in western graphic notation and realised in performances (rather than the other way around), and with other musics, such as folk music or ethnic musics being occasionally transcribed for cataloguing or use in variations or vocal arrangements, for example, but generally not notated, being passed on instead through the oral tradition. However, since the advent of the recording age there has been a subversion of the previously more one-way progression of graphic notation (or preservation) to sonic realisation.

  Beard and Gloag interestingly describe Adorno’s viewpoint as being that ‘recording preserves music as a universal, but petrified, form of text’ [1], which is an interesting image in the context of questions of exchange between graphic and sonic technologies, and Timothy Day also uses the image of recording as a ‘photograph’ of a performance [2]. Sound recording has given this relationship between music and ideas of graphic representation a much greater scope and fluidity since the twentieth-century and has continued to be one of the main driving forces in musical change right into the twenty-first-century. At this stage it is useful to raise the point that although the two areas of graphic and sonic representation are usually dominated by traditional western musical notation and sound recording (as heard on record, CD, and digitalised sound) respectively, there are other less centralised technologies and techniques to mention, such as experimental scores of the twentieth century avant-garde, which might use gestural graphic notation of pitch or dynamic for instance, or even pictorial representation, and that there are also other means of producing a record of sounds or performances, such as player pianos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

   Player-pianos are an interesting grey area between graphic and sonic technologies, as the notes are perforated into a roll, which is potentially both a visual document and performance of a piece of music. Timothy Day explains that ‘The reproducing piano’ was an early alternative to wax disc gramophone recording for pianists. They could make a roll for ‘reproducing piano’ by playing a specially constructed piano keyboard in which electrical circuits were completed through the touching of a contact beneath each key when pressed. The completion of the electrical circuit for a specific note moved a pencil out of a large set (each representing a note) to make a mark on a revolving paper (or occasionally metal) roll, with the length of the lines corresponding exactly to the length of time for which the performer held the note. The movement of the pedals could also be recorded in this way. Dynamic shading was ascertained by measuring the speed of the each hammer stroke, and represented in the final roll, once the pencil marks had been cut out, by different sizes of perforations. The rolls are re-played by a player-piano operated by a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism, in which the perforations were transmitted back, via variations in air pressure through the holes, to the piano keys. This ‘reproducing’ player piano was more nuanced than the pianola, capturing real pianists’ performances, rather than simply the musical notes set down, as it contained the pianist’s articulation, variation of tempo and dynamics. Both of these were highly popular from the turn of the twentieth century (1904) up to around 1929, in which the stock market crash wiped out most of the demand for them. As Day describes, ‘Nearly all the world’s leading pianists made rolls in the first three decades of the century’ partly to fulfil the idea of setting down their art for posterity, and many of these remain to us today and the performances contained can still be eerily reproduced.

   The possibility of recording performances and whole concerts in ways such as this (although mainly through sound recordings) has subtly contributed to change in the way musicians feel about a performance, or change in an audience’s sense of nostalgia if a specific performance which they attended can be subsequently heard again and relived. Daniel Barenboim theorised in his 2006 Reith Lectures that musical performance is a test of character, as each time you play a piece of music you are essentially starting from scratch and building it again, since previous performances do not count. Robert Philip supports this idea of performance and compares it to recording, stating that ‘[a] recording is something incomplete, and fixed. And it also removes the element of risk.’[3] There are many chances to get a recording right and to tinker with it in the studio, whereas in the concert hall there is only one: ‘In the concert hall there is one chance only, nothing can be undone, and musicians and audiences have to take what comes and make the best of it.’ However, due to recording technology there is the possibility of a two-way dialogue between graphic and sonic preservation techniques and it is not now merely a process moving from graphic conception to sonic performance. An example of this from popular rock music is the publication of The Beatles Complete Scores (published by the Hal Leonard Corporation, 1993), transcribed from the original albums. The use of graphic notation in a full score constitutes part of a growing acceptance of the Beatles’ works as worthy of musicological study (and of popular music in general) and partly cementing their status in a more ‘classical’ medium, even transcribing their improvised solos.

   This leads onto a further, highly significant aspect of sound recording’s impact on musical change, namely its ability to capture improvisation on record, most significantly in jazz music, allowing for transcriptions of famous improvised solos and pieces and setting up interesting new relationships between sound, musical composition, improvisation, and notation. As Mark Katz states in Capturing Sound. How Technology has changed Music [4], ‘In Jazz, the values of the classical world are inverted: the performance is the primary text, while the score is merely an interpretation.’ Thanks to modern visual and audio technology, an action can be lifted out of time and made into a thing, occupying space as an object. This has an important bearing on improvisation in the recording age, as the notation of recorded improvisation is the ultimate reification of an ephemeral action, making a distinctly spacial, interpreted version of a historical event which would otherwise be trapped in history or what Stephen J. Gould describes as ‘time’s arrow’ (Gould, 1987). Sound recording creates the possibility of highly interesting dialogues and blurring between text and performance, between Henri Bergson’s spacial metaphors (from Time and Free Will) of ‘temps durée’ (events in a succession of durations, as on a time-line) and ‘temps éspace’ (reflective time – ‘time within us that endures’), which can be crudely described as clock-time versus psychological time, and between the previously more separated ideas of temporal event and spacial object. As Paul Clarke states in his highly engaging article, ‘A Magic Science’: Rock Music as a Recording Art:

Up until the last hundred years or so an artist or communicator wishing to address his public had two options. He could make something - an object, a picture, a book, a musical score - or alternatively he could do something, perform something- speak, mime, dance, play an instrument- embodying in that action whatever he had to say. [...] in the recording arts our experience of an ‘act of doing’ is no longer bound to a particular occasion; instead the action, aural or visual, can be lifted out of the time continuum and given a solid embodiment in a made ‘thing’, to be released back into time when desired. [5]

It is this blurring of the distinction between the act of doing and the act of making that bears an interesting relation with jazz improvisation of the twentieth century in the concretisation of improvisation and its dialogue with musical notation. One of the most interesting examples of this is how the recording of Keith Jarrett’s seminal live improvised performance at the Opera of Köln (Cologne), Germany on January 24^th, 1975 has been treated in lieu of its wide success as a solo jazz record. Keith Jarrett’s record producer Manfred Eicher arranged for him to do an eighteen concert solo tour of Europe in 1973, two of which were recorded and sold as a box set on his record label, ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music). These were ‘without precedent’[6] in that they were completely improvised concerts with deliberately no preconceived themes or musical thoughts, as Jarrett actively attempted to empty himself of any preconceived ideas beforehand and then ‘allow the music to flow through and out of him’, as Ian Carr describes in Jarrett’s biography[7]. In these concerts therefore, Jarrett was extensively exploring the process of improvisation using his great technical skill as a pianist, with these virtuosic concerts lasting over an hour each. Jarrett’s Köln Concert, performed on January 24, 1975 and recorded and released on the ECM label contains roughly an hour and seven minutes of purely improvised music and sold more than 3.5 million copies, becoming the best-selling solo album in jazz history. This is ironic, given that Jarrett had not expected the concert to go well and almost decided not to record it due to a series of problems including lack of sleep, chronic back-pain, a rushed meal, and the fact that the organisers had transferred the wrong Bösendorfer piano (a sub-concert-standard baby-grand), which sounded ‘tinny’ according to Jarrett in its outer-registers[8] instead of the Bösendorfer Imperial concert grand which he had intended. The recording at this point, therefore, was intended literally as a record of the concert – in Jarrett’s words he thought ‘what about having just a documentary of this...’[9]. Once Jarrett was on stage, however, he found a sense of calm in the opening piece of his performance which contrasted with the stress endured leading up to the concert.

  The canonical status which this ‘trance-like’ performance achieved was, nevertheless, a great surprise to Jarrett and ECM. This in turn led to the authorised transcription of the entire Köln Concert in 1991 by Yukiko Kishinami and Kunihiko Yamashita, which was closely overseen by Jarrett himself [10]. Jarrett’s preface to the transcription is highly interesting in relation to the dialogue between notated and recorded music. He ironically starts by saying, somewhat conservatively, that he never really wanted to cave to popular demand and authorise a transcription, as ‘(1) this was a totally improvised concert on a certain night and should go as quickly as it comes; and (2) it is almost impossible to transcribe many sections as they are on record.’ However, he goes on to say that ‘since this improvisation already exists in one permanent format (recording), and the transcription only represents the music (although it is incredibly close sometimes), I finally decided to publish the authorized edition.’ Here Jarrett inadvertently subverts Day’s image of the recorded performance as a ‘photograph’, saying, ‘we are looking at, let us say, a picture of an improvisation [ie. the transcription] (sort of like a print of a painting). You cannot see the depth in it, only the surface.’ For this reason Jarrett strongly suggests that even though the transcription has been published, any pianist wishing to play it should consult the sound recordings as the ultimate point of reference. Despite this, the publication of this transcription marks a significant point in the blurring of improvisation into real-time composition, producing a reified full piano score, monumentalising the position of what may now be termed Jarrett’s musical ‘work’ as opposed to ‘improvisation’ in the twentieth-century canon.

This is an interesting development from the pre-recording age improvisatory keyboard practices of composers such as Liszt, who improvised extensively in solo concerts and wrote many piano pieces in an improvisatory or rhapsodic style, giving us a glimpse at what one of his improvised concerts may have sounded like. This link can be drawn right back to figures such as Bach and his improvisatory pieces and Handel, who would improvise during the intervals if his Oratorios, for instance. The transcription of Jarrett’s canonical improvised concert certainly lends itself to and greatly facilitates scholarly analysis of improvisational style, technique and forms, much in the same way that reconstructing classic Hollywood film scores (which were almost always thrown together by a variety of people including orchestrators and copyists, leaving inaccurate manuscript records) helps to provide a more solid base for musicological film-score study, such as Ben Winters’s film score guide to The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), published in 2007. But although sonic technology can greatly facilitate graphic notation such as in these examples, it has also de-centralised the score as the definitive musical object, as great performances can become as canonicised as the works themselves in all genres of music, and for popular and world music, sound recordings have become the main objects of study as opposed to musical text, as in the case of classical music. Although figures such as Adorno and Ralph Vaughan Williams (who termed the rise of the use of the gramophone as ‘superficial’ and ‘lazy’[11], preferring aural transcription techniques for his folk-music collecting) would disagree, it is arguable that the ability to record and reproduce music has helped greatly in the study of musics (such as world, popular and folk) which are not based on musical text or rely on the oral tradition. Recorded music can even be used to synthesis the process of the aural tradition, with students being able to learn folk tunes aurally from recordings, as a substitute for the older expert or teacher.

   Sound recording technology can therefore be used to provide an artificial direct performance or speech, potentially negating the need for textual representation as an intermediary stage, thus it is possible for musical works to be realised, recorded and reproduced as performances in sound, without text, or with text being provided at a later stage, almost as an after-thought (such as in the case of Keith Jarrett, transcribed jazz solos in general, and The Beatles Complete Scores edition). Playing a record is in a large sense a reading. The extremely nuanced grooves, which can be seen as a graphic, three-dimensional notation, or represented graphically in sound waves, are read by a record-player’s needle or by a CD player’s laser. To a certain extent all recording is graphic. Digital recording is simply extremely nuanced graphic representation which can be very easily reproduced and copied due to technological advances. Similarly ‘thick description’, as championed by the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, is a viable method of graphic notation for not only ethnomusicology, but musicology in general, and simply represents the opposite end of the representational spectrum for preserving some aspect of music. Sound recording technology has enabled a more fluid discourse between the concepts of improvisation, composition, notation (or musical ‘preservation’) technologies and performance, contributing to change in the way these terms are perceived and related. Sonic technologies have thus simultaneously de-centralised the role of musical text but also greatly facilitated musical notation in new contexts and directions, which seems to be leading towards a more inclusive (or open) musicology.

Bibliography:

Beard, David and Gloag, Kenneth, Musicology: The Key Concepts, London and New York;

Routledge, 2005

Carr, Ian, Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music, London; Da Capo Press, 1991.

Chanan, Michael, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music, London; Verso, 1995.

Clarke, Paul, ‘‘A Magic Science’: Rock Music as a Recording Art’, Popular Music, Vol. 3, Producers

and Markets (1983), pp. 195-213, Published by: Cambridge University Press.

Cox, Christoph and Warner, Daniel (ed.) Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, London and

New York; The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2006.

Day, Timothy, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to History, New Haven, Yale University

Press, 2000.

Jarrett, Keith, The Köln Concert: Original Transcription, Tokyo; Schott Music International, 1991

Katz, Mark, Capturing Sound. How Technology has changed Music, Berkeley; University of

California Press, 2004

Philip, Robert, Performing Music in the Age of Recording, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004.