In this summary I will discuss the development from directive to descriptive notation of reading music and examine the similarity between musical and verbal literacy in reading beyond the physical form.

The current format of music notation has only been sparsely “standardized from the Renaissance period” (Saunders 1), despite its records throughout the world as early as the third century BCE. These early forms of notation shared a “common purpose of preserving and safeguarding the music of a culture” (Cole 9), and were usually linked closely to religious activities. They were often held sacred, and the knowledge was kept secretive by appointed music officials. Europe’s first evidence of music notation is also found in clerical works of Catholic monks who developed a system of dots and strokes above the lyrics of songs, as for the use of directive communication. The notations “functioned as a reminder to someone who already knew the tune” (Goodman 12), its purpose being merely a guide to a skilled performer. Music was taught orally by instructions through sounds and hand gestures, involving intense memorization from a student to preserve the tune in memory, as to play it again without detailed information on tempo and pitch. Such practice gave freedom and authority to the reader of music notation, where the notator and the reader would rely on the shared understanding of appropriateness of a notational system. “Reading music [was] an instance of performance, of acting out the instructions inscribed” (Ingold 11) in notes only to trigger a certain action by the reader. Therefore, reading music notation was not reading the “work” itself, but enacting “the text composed in performance with the help of standard formula” (Coleman 35) by a reader who had previous knowledge of the actual work aurally.

However, the inability to fully express pitch, tempo and rhythm by reading notation motivated various modifications of the system. In the sixteenth century, the staff notation on a stave of five-lines was introduced in France, becoming widely used as the first standardized format of recording music (Cole 9). The development into grammatical structure in notations made “the meanings of each term fixed by definition” (Cole 13), similar to that of scientific and mathematic symbols. This structure allowed for an “instant visual recognition by the performer and ease of reproduction” (Gardner 2), further aiding in the spread of knowledge, as it was no longer restricted to clergies. Reading music notation quickly became a descriptive work rather than a directive signs of early and medieval times. The purpose now became to “describe the sound with sufficient accuracy to allow a musician reading it to produce a fair copy of the original work” (Ingold 11) without knowing the tune or the rhythm beforehand. However, the overload of bar lines, expression signs and terms to indicate tempo and dynamics of music soon created confusion and further issues amongst performers and composers. The ambiguity in notation as “many composers [were] needlessly nonspecific in their choice of symbology” (Gardner 2), lacked universal clarity of specific symbols. However, this problem was largely fixed by the invention of the printing press, despite its “continual evolution well into twentieth century as composers found new means of expression” (Scelta 7).

The real problem of descriptive music notation, however, was the inability of composers to notate every single aspect of the performance, even with the complex and numerous symbols of indication. Therefore, music notation is “necessarily incomplete on essential matters” (Cole 17), in that the notator is forced to leave a certain amount of the interpretation up to the reader. This aspect of reading the meanings of music notation that “reveal no correspondence with the physical properties of the stimulus” (Pratt 9), shares common traits to verbal literacy. As reading music notation retrieved its Medieval directive aspect, the interpretability of Medieval verbal literacy “by their nature, continue[d] to be filled with meaning” (Dalbello 72) beyond literal meaning as well. Both the verbal and musical literacy depends on figuring out the “very notion of intentionality and meaning” (Sharpe 9) of a text to often “determine meaning outside the endless play of words of signs” (Sharpe 9).

Citations

1. Cole, Hugo. Sounds and Signs: Aspects of Musical Notation. London: Oxford UP, 1974. Print.

2. Coleman, Joyce. Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

3. Dalbello, Marija, and Mary Shaw, eds. Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2011. Print.

4. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008. Print.

5. Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

6. Pratt, Caroll C. The Meaning of Music: A Study in Psychological Aesthetics. 2nd ed. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968. Print.

7. Read, Gardner. Pictographic Score Notation: A Compendium. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1998. Print.

8. Saunders, Matthew. “An Excerpt from Chapter 6 of Forthcoming Book, Music: Notation and Practice in Past and Present, Now in Press with National Social Science Press.” Web log comment. Matthew Saunders Blog. WordPress Entries, 14 June 2011. Web. 4 Mar. 2012. <http://martiandances.com/blog/?p=264>.

9. Scelta, Gabriella F. “History and the Evolution of the Musical Symbol.” This Is Gabe Scelta. Gabe Scelta. Web. 4 Mar. 2012. <http://www.thisisgabes.com/images/stories/docs/musicsymbol.pdf>

10. Sharpe, Kevin. Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Print.