A Brief History of Musical Scribbles
So I’ve realized that my previous posts have been pretty focused on my own life. I don’t have many rules for my writing here, but ostensibly it’s meant to be mostly about music, so this week, to get things back on track, I’m turning the dial all the way to 11, and starting my story with every music history student’s “favourite” topic : medieval neumes!
What are neumes, you might ask? Well, they’re the little scribbles that composers used to use to write down music, before we invented the slightly different scribbles that we all decided were much easier to read.
The specific scribbling that inspired my reflections this week is from this manuscript of a Ballade by 14th century French composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut.
Now I’ll be honest, the notation on this page doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. In some aspects, it resembles the music I’m used to reading, but the symbols are all mostly unfamiliar. Without a recording or a transcription into “modern” notation, I’d need quite a bit of explanation before I could get a sense of what it should sound like.
A friend of mine put it best: beautiful to look at, but a pain to read.
It had been quite a while since I had encountered any medieval neumes, and it reminded me of the unique challenges of transmitting musical ideas by writing. As time progressed and “modern notation” was developed, the scores of the Western musical tradition became more and more precise and information dense. Musical time was divided into easily quantifiable units, the speed of a piece was set with tempo indications and then further specified with metronome markings. Composers started adding dynamics, indicating the relative volume of different passages. Expressive words and markings became commonplace, instructing musicians on what kind of sound to use and feelings to evoke.
The result was that by the 20th century, even “conventionally” notated music had become extremely complex and specific. To get a bit geeky for a moment, a traditional favourite example of this is the music of Anton Webern, the Austrian composer who had a penchant for writing intricate miniatures, described as “dazzling diamonds”. This one line piece is from his 3 Short pieces for cello and piano, and gives an idea just how precise musical notation had become.
The funny thing, is that despite all of this increased precision since the neumes of the Middle Ages, notation still can’t tell you everything about how to play a piece of music. Each era had its own unwritten customs, each composer their own assumptions about how their markings would be interpreted, and ultimately, each musician’s very personal choices and spontaneity makes every performance unique.
My teacher in Paris, would often remind us of this imperfection of musical notation, of how it was just a convention that composers were forced to cram their ideas into so that they would have the best chance of being understood.
He also like to talk about how few people can read a score the same way we read a book. When we read words on a page, most people have an inner voice speaking the words to them, a phenomenon called subvocalization. However, the musical equivalent seems to be extremely rare, and for myself and most musicians I’ve ever talked to, when we look at a score we don’t already know, we can’t necessarily hear what the music would sound like in our heads.
It’s a strange realization, to stare at a page of music and become aware that you have little idea of what it will sound like. That is, at least that is until I pick up my cello and translate those little scribbles into sounds.
The imperfect chain of musical communication — from a composer’s ideas, to markings on a page, translated by a performer and their instrument into sounds, and finally experienced as music by listeners — is a thought that gives me vertigo if I ponder it for too long. The fact that this system works at all and has preserved centuries of music is astonishing. It’s one of those things I find absolutely incredible about Western music, that pursuit of making ideas immortal.
One thing that made our friend Guillaume de Machaut particularly interesting for his time was that he was exceedingly concerned about the transmission of his own music, and spent a considerable amount of effort at the end of his life preparing manuscripts of his complete works. Machaut had lived through the Black Death, and I find myself wondering whether his obsession with making sure his music was recorded in writing was perhaps triggered by observing how word of mouth transmission didn’t stand a chance against the plague.
I do wonder what Machaut would think if he could be here now, 650 years later, in the midst of another pandemic, as someone looks at a jpeg of his music on a Macbook Air while typing out their thoughts for people to read over the Internet. I would hope he would get a kick out of knowing his painstaking work continues to be admired, even in a way he probably could never have imagined.