why transcription

[Judith R Cohen <judithc...>]

Sylvie asks,

> What do we lose, or gain, by preserving material in a
> written form?
> 

Well, lots on both sides, lose and gain. Like so much else - tv for
example - there's nothing intrinsically good or bad about transcription,
it's just how one uses it. For preservation, for composition, teaching,
analysis, transmission ; and on its own or with other , aural-dependent,
aspects of the music in question.

By the way, why was Jewish and Muslim music in the Middle Ages not
written down when the music notation of the church was available to
them, especially in medieval Iberia? I have to go back and dig up old
notes (from my ancient M.A. thesis on women musicians in the three
cultures of medieval Iberia), but remember reading that while there were
Jewish music theoreticians, they didn't feel that "imprisoning" worship
music in notation was a service to the music. This is a paraphrase and
extrapolation and I need to find the actual citation, which I could be
remembering incorrectly. There are indeed tracts of medieval Arabic
music but they focus on rhythmic patterns rather than melodies. And I
imagine that our interpretation of the church and troubadour etc.
melodies are pretty far from what they sounded like, though it's the
best we can do under the circumstances.




When western music notation (there are other systems geared to specific
traditions) developed, it was a very exciting tool. Originally it seems
to have been used in cicrumstances where people who had access to
writing and to manuscripts - a privileged minroity - were familiar with
the tradition and needed a memory aid. There are wonderful medieval
illustrations of monks standing in a close group reading from one
gigantic manuscript of the plainchant of the day.  It quickly developed
far beyond that, as a compositional tool, and a preservation
"technology". And soon after, the printing press came.

When ethnomusicology began as a discipline, transcription was a hallowed
cornerstone of training and revered marker of the good
ethnomusicologist. In most cases, there was no alternative; not everyone
had access to the new recording technology, and it had its limitations
(the famous/infamous "3-minute piece" etc). As recording became more
accessible, and, slowly, more portable and more affordable,
super-accurate transcription became even more prized as there was no no
"excuse" . The melograph was invented (by Pete Seeger's father Charles)
but never really caught on. 
But all this was aimed much more at study and analysis than at
performance. (Charles Seeger's own distinction between "descriptive" and
"prescriptive" transcriptions.)

But recently, I've been asking myself Sylvie's question. Many of the
recent excellent books on ethnomusicology - Jane Sugarman on Albanian
music, Tim Rice on Bulgarian, Ted Levin on Central Asia, Mark Slobin on
klezmer, Kay Shelemay on Syrian Jewish music, to name the ones which
come to mind immediately, include a CD. It does not seem to have added
all that significantly to production costs. When I reviewed Jane's book
for a journal, I compared her transcriptions to the CD of her field
recordings. They're splendid transcriptions, and very accurate - and
they do NOT, by themselves, give any idea of what the music sounds like.
Because they simply can't, unless you really happen to have spent a lot
of time listening to traditional Albanian singing, and even then...

As Itzik-Leyb said, an "auxiliary". A useful, helpful, multi-functional
auxiliary, which the presence of easily available recordings does not
make irrelevant: it simply changes its function and depending on how one
uses it, even may enhance it. But it's no substitute for learning a
tradition now that alternatives (what ethnomusicologists dubbed
"secondary orality a couple of decades ago" are available.
cheers, Judith (I wasn't GOING to write any more long messages about
this...)
PS
Blind musicians are of course a case in point; yesterday I was talking
with a colleague whose teenaged daughter has been totally blind from
birth and is an accomplished classically trained violinist - obviously
in this case, transcriptions are still the basis of her learning but
filtered through the interpretative skills and choices of her teachers.
They are ANYWAY, of course, but in this case entirely rather than
partially.

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