Re: why transcription

[Sylvie Braitman <curlySylvie...>]

Judith,

Thanks for a very interesting comment!
What was your master about?
Sylvie 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Judith R Cohen" <judithc (at) YorkU(dot)CA>
To: "World music from a Jewish slant" <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 2:53 AM
Subject: why transcription


> 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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