This is the musicology portion of the Music Software: Composing Electronic Music Using Sibelius article that I posted earlier. Here’s the track again:
The Hard Way is the Only Way
Music Software: For a lot of composers, writing music with Sibelius or Finale is an interesting experience because it combines the act of writing notes on score with the “studio recording” method of being able to listen back to what you already have. The idea of combining notation and recording practices together has existed since the beginning of digital audio computing, after the realization that both types of information could be unified through binary code. Not limited to just Sibelius or Finale, but most sequencing programs are, in one way or another, also moving toward this goal. Why is this development significant?
Drawn-in by the power and potential of computing systems, there’s a tendency for many musicians to focus only on its ability to create “new” and “novel” sound combinations. I put these words in quotes, mostly because during the last couple of decades people have seemed to internalized the idea that there’s now “nothing new under the sun”, after having heard so many different sounds in so many different combinations. To most people’s ears, electronic and electroacoustic sounds just feels generically “otherworldly” (only useful for movies about space travel and such), while the novelty of “sample mashing” seems to have lost its steam due to overuse. The common practice now is to remix tracks of by-gone eras, in hopes that the listener will somehow re-connect to the already established narratives of its time. (A similar thing could be said about what Hollywood is doing in their movie production lines as well.) People have, in a general sense, become pretty skeptical of the notion of “newness” as a whole.
In order to understand how we got to this point, let’s first pretend that this is the pre-digital era, before splicing and editing of recordings became a common practice as it is today. Here we’re comparing the pros and cons of notated musics (classical) vs. recorded musics (jazz, pop, rock, electronic, etc) in very broad terms. Most of the notions below come from various rants/raves from fans and advocates of each practice:
Advantages of Notation: cheap to produce (pencil+paper), powerful editing capabilities, individual and unified vision of an idea, a built-in and reliable performance-practice system, high learning curve increases quality of candidates
Advantages of Recordings: cheap sound-production (playback device only), sound materials can be said to be untampered with therefore “authentic”, collaborative and diversified vision of an idea, new and innovative performance-practices, an open and diverse talent pool
Disadvantages of Notation: expensive to perform (requires experienced performers), the editing process makes things trite and superficial, composer might turn out to be a tyrant, endless bureaucracy (especially in orchestras), too much education in one method leads to naïveté/nostalgia
Disadvantages of Recordings: expensive to produce (studio time and equipment), its “realism” makes everything materialistic and superficial, differences in opinion leads to in-fighting, no organization = nothing gets done, lack of education leads to naïveté/nostalgia
You’ll probably notice that a lot of the advantages and disadvantages can be interchanged depending on what perspective you take. This chart is a polite, “clean” version of heated debates that had happened during the late-20th century, which often included allegations of racism, superficiality, elitism, incompetence, ignorance, and class-warfare. So the two worlds, as a general rule of thumb, don’t tend to get along very well.
Guitar tab in Sibelius
As we move into the digital age, most of these advantages and disadvantages have simply disappeared as a methodological issue. A skilled recording engineer can now edit just as well as a composer might be able to on score, while distribution methods (the publishing vs. recording industries) have been blurring together as a result of the internet taking prominence in the public’s day to day lives. Nonetheless, underneath the surface lies very strong ideological and pedagogical differences that have yet to be resolved.
As mentioned in the previous post, in terms of sound production, Sibelius or Finale doesn’t add anything new to what’s already been done. It does, however, have the ability to change the way we listen to music, which has the potential to change people’s relationships and reactions to the idea of “organized sounds”. Here it helps to draw a parallel between music notation and the written word.
Musicians with classical training often have the ability to “read” scores much in the same way an average person might be able to read a book in print. For a book-reader, they might imagine the sounds of a voice in their head as they read through the lines on page. Musicians do the same thing with scores, except that they’re translating noteheads into musical sounds. Hollywood often portrays this ability as being spiritual or even mystic in nature, but these skills are no different than those which require the learning of a secondary language. The act is a matter of musical “literacy” — Western notation has its own syntax and grammar, which can often be difficult to learn, but not impossible for anyone with the motivation to do so.
MIDI sequencing
The fetishized images of musical literacy comes from the simple fact that it’s rarer for these skills to be taught to children at a younger age, so people who “have it” tend to come across as an anomaly. Children learn to pick up how words “sound” by having stories read to them by their parents or teachers, then learn how to write based on those previous experiences. These forms of education now having become standard practice, people rarely question the average person’s ability to read, listen, speak, and write at least on some basic level.
It is less frequent, however, for people to learn musical ideas in this way. Music education attempts to bridge the gaps between these fields (score reading while listening to performances/recordings), but they’re usually facing an uphill battle due to the fact that these divergences have become entrenched inside of modern society’s industrial standards and its emphasis on specialization. Writers become composers, speakers become performers, readers become musicologists, while listeners are the mere consumers of a musical product. While most people would not consider themselves to be “writers” or “speakers”, they’re able to appreciate these things when they see it done well, since they have at least some first-hand experience with it. Music, however, currently doesn’t have this type of familiarity with the public, due to its specialized nature.
Similar to novels, music also has the ability to “tell a story”, even without the need for visual aids or program notes. This type of appreciation, however, comes through an understanding of music that’s largely linguistic in nature. It is one of the very few ways where the listener can derive meaning from sounds beyond the sounds themselves, and acquire something that may be of use outside of the context of the performance itself.
In situations where this type of syntax doesn’t exist, music tends to survive by attaching itself to existing narratives — the success of musics found in film, TV, commercials, Musak, and video games tend to highlight the fact that the medium has largely become subservient to other forms of art, at least in the commercial sector. In popular music styles, people look for meaning inside the lyrics of the singer, rather than necessarily paying attention to what the bassist or drummer has to “say”. Instrumental musics then become a backdrop for something else, rather than appreciated as a narrative device in itself.
The main reason for this development is due to the fact that music currently doesn’t have the same kind of “learned” audience base as it has in the literary worlds. As a result, the way in which we acquire our information and education — which includes the internet as a whole — is done mainly through text, words, or in the case of Youtube, visual narratives.
Notation software programs, however, are currently bridging this gap through the combination of the literary and oratory traditions. It’s useful for training music skills/theory, while its playback function helps to solidify the correlations between notes and sound, which are all necessary skills for acquiring musical literacy. These programs are being used more and more within music educational programs now, but if Avid can manage to get the Score Exchange community off the ground, it could possibly cultivate a new generation of musicians prone to writing music in a certain type of way. (What that “way” might be, at this point, is unknown.)
Perhaps they should consider opening up the community to possibly including electronic music as well. It could shake up how things are done on the site, as well as the music industry as a whole.
Related posts:
Pingback: Composing Electronic Music with Sibelius | Ryan Tanaka