What the Dots Leave Out

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a record I can tend to recognize in a random second of listening. To be honest with you, I’ve just had a kind of breakthrough: to recognize something in under a second really leaves out a lot of the pitch and duration aspect of the music, because it’s such a short sample. Timbre is maybe among the most important aspects. When I think of Sgt. Pepper’s, I imagine all these sounds — the harp in “She’s Leaving Home,” the sitar in George Harrison’s brilliant “Within You Without You,” the circus of “Mr. Kite,” and most anything in “A Day in the Life.” Every song has a unique sonic fingerprint. I love the chords, the melodies, and the rhythms of all these songs, but I never quite realized how impactful the timbre is until I forced my mind into a second of time — which is a very small amount of time to actually understand anything musically.

Try it with a record you know. Put it on, stop it after one second, and ask yourself what you actually heard.

What a score is for

Now step back to what the page was built to do. The monks in their cold stone rooms, trying to remember what they had sung last Tuesday, needed a memory that outlasted the singing. That is the oldest job of notation: to mark music down so it can be remembered, taught, studied, shaped, and shared.

It is still the job. When you’re a musician working with yourself, let alone working with other people, how you communicate is absolutely essential. Whether that’s a band learning the song by ear or a string trio getting together to play music that’s just been written out, you need to communicate. Sometimes you need to communicate by writing paragraphs of information, and sometimes just a few notes in point form, or just a couple; sometimes it’s a symphonic score or a simple chord chart that you need to distribute to members of your band. And since our hands are often busy with music, it’s nice to have it written out on some stable place, like a piece of paper that we can watch as we play.

The page does that job superbly for the music it was built for. The question is what it does with the sound you recognized in a second.

What the dots keep, and what they leave out

Is any of that on the page? As Chapter 1.2 lays out, traditional notation is great for pitch and rhythm, it’s okay for dynamics, but it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to indicating timbre.

Pitch and duration, kept. Loudness, roughly. Timbre — the thing you recognized in one second — hardly at all.

And if you need an example of how much can slip through, you needn’t go any later than 1936. Listen to Robert Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen.” You’d find great difficulty trying to truly, accurately transcribe everything you hear. It could certainly be approximated, but when you hear all of the sliding and the microtones and the vocal performance, you would be in for quite a challenge.

The recording is the score

In the modern era, pop music is hardly ever transcribed or written down, certainly in its initial creation. We must use our ears and go to the source, which is the recording itself. The recording is the score of pop music. Play it note for note and rhythm for rhythm — and, of course, there’s always room for interpretation. We see that in the classical world, where there are many, many recordings of the same piece, each with different nuance and expression; and we all know songs are covered by lots of different artists in many different styles. This is neither a good nor a bad thing.

The grid in your hands

And there is a third way of writing music down now, one many readers already use. Music literacy is, quite literally, changing. There are many people now who can read a DAW grid — a piano roll, coloured blocks, waveforms — and for what they do, they can see things that the page could never show them. Anyone making an argument for literacy in music must increasingly include this form of it; before you know it, it may be quite standard. I like the piano-roll grid. It shows proportional pitch and time, and sometimes you can see shapes and patterns just as easily in a grid as on the written page — sometimes more easily. What it lacks is the constant reinforcement of pitch collections: keys, chords, the specific notes and elements involved in them. It reduces music more to pure shape. That works for many people.

Music literacy is changing

These are different forms of notation, different ways of representing musical events. A violinist in a symphony doesn’t necessarily need to read a DAW grid, though it’s not unusual now to find someone doing both. I can’t predict where musical literacy will end up or what it will look like. But its reality has changed considerably in my lifetime, and it continues to change.

It’s really valuable to be able to read and write music as a skill on its own, just as it is to be able to play — and these skills are not mutually exclusive; they work together to create a good picture. When you can read, write, speak and listen, you have the four cardinal points of musicianship: skills that are very much in demand in any team effort, but just as much for your own mind and your own way of organizing this beautiful phenomenon of music.

Reading doesn’t make anyone a genius, mind you. If there was a Homer who was blind, that doesn’t make Homer a lesser thing, and even if Homer was illiterate, it would not make Homer a lesser thing. The epics are part of a bardic tradition, not a literary one — and so are the Beatles. They had a certain truth, an ability, a way of combining things in new ways, which is what mattered. Greatness, if I can use that term, is related to the truth and the honesty of the product. I love the Beatles and I love Bach, and I make no apology for either. The fact that the Beatles were never musically literate is completely beside the point.

But if you told me it was good that they never learned, I’d have a different opinion. I think it’s sad that we don’t learn to read and write music the way we learn to read and write our language as children. When you do it young enough, it just becomes what you do, until one day you realize you’re literate. Coming to it as an adult is harder — my mother taught adult literacy for years, and it is a slow process; we adults tend to intellectualize everything, and nothing quite takes the place of being immersed in the thing itself. None of that is a value judgment. It’s just a fact to acknowledge, and to compensate for.

As usual, I think the hybrid — a mixture of skills — is ultimately the best policy for the widest group of people.

This week

Pick a song you know and love. Write down just the rhythm of the opening — or just the first six or seven notes of the tune, however many it takes. Use slashes, grid blocks, dashes on a napkin, or standard dots — whatever gets the pattern outside your head.

Next Monday

Chapter 1.3, It’s About Time — rhythm, which the page writes well, and a question the dots answer only halfway: where does the weight fall?

Chapter 1.2, Lines and Dots and Blobs, Oh My!, is on the site: https://www.thecommontone.com/textbook/1-2-lines-and-dots-and-blobs/