Notation Must Die!

February 14, 2024 1:52 PM

Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music [1h15m] has had me fascinated and thrilled with new information since I started watching it. Even if you know nothing about musical notation, you might also find this history and evolution and dissection of those weird 🎶 fascinating.
posted by hippybear (44 comments total)

This is mistagged, the video is about chess notation. I watched a full 10 minutes of it to be sure, yup, it's all chess.
posted by donio at 2:12 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

The chess bit is an overly-long introduction. The music stuff starts after that. (assuming you were being serious and not snarky :)
posted by indexy at 2:27 PM on February 14

The thesis of the video is not that notation must die, for those of you, like me, who assumed that it was. It is, instead, an interesting examination of all of the attempts that have been made to move away from standard notation and why, for the most part, they have failed.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:31 PM on February 14 [6 favorites]

Once upon a time, I was able to sight read music, but I lost the skill over the years. And I'm honestly fine with this, since all of my interaction with music in the past 20 years has been using tools that don't use notation natively - either literally a spreadsheet of notes (i.e. tracker style software, if you're familiar) or piano roll style (which I actually hate, but... i can deal with it).

I'd love to see something more intuitive for actually playing music on instruments like piano/keyboard than staff notation, although I'll admit I'm yet to find it (piano roll is great for composing, but shite for actually reading, ime). The closest is guitar tabs, which are obviously incredibly popular amongst guitarists where staff notation makes even less sense than most other instruments.
posted by jaymzjulian at 2:46 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

I jumped to the bit about the clefs, which isn't even all of it - my wife is really going through it right now with her piano teacher who was trained in solfege method in Europe. This framework is organized (if I understand it correctly, I find it bonkers) to, depending on where the clef symbol falls *across* the staff, that will determine where "G" is. Meaning, if you move that treble symbol up or down on the staff, you transpose the notes that are played. imho, it undermines the basic utility of the clef types altogether for knowing what a given line or space signifies. does sound like it makes it easier to transpose if you can just abstract it to the melodic intervals, but good grief...
posted by SoundInhabitant at 2:52 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

Truly, it's the C clef that gets moved around a lot. the G and F clefs tend to remain pretty stationary. with the second line from the bottom/top being the focus of the clef. I've seen that C-clef on just about any line or even spaces which seems peculiarly cruel.
posted by hippybear at 2:56 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

And really, I found it odd that this was never mentioned in the video, the Treble and Bass clefs, the G and F, when mounted in a piano score setting with Treble above and Bass below, they conveniently merge together on the first line above the staff, middle C. so there isn't any weird transition where a line should be a space or whatever, it just all flows smoothly up and across both staves.

You really mostly only see C clef used in wind instruments and things like Viola.

Also, let's not even get into the difference between what wind instruments have as a "regular A" and a "concert A" as their parts can often be written in entirely different keys from all the other instruments.
posted by hippybear at 3:53 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

I mean, a lot of this stuff is sort of "easier/more intuitive for what?" territory.

Transposition is often just a function of musicians switching within groups of related instruments. How the pitch is going to change is much less obvious when you're talking about which fingers to press down on trumpet with 3 keys to make all the notes than on a violin where everything laid out linearly in 4 parallel lines. It's much easy for the trumpet player to learn "this combination of pressing down buttons equals a note on this line of the staff" and have that hold true across the family of instruments.

Movable clef stuff is great for solo repertoire for cellos or string basses where there's a very wide range of pitches (just shy of 4 octaves on a bass, larger on the cello) and it avoids having to read a lot of ledger lines, which can also mess up the spacing of the music.

So like, this notation has all been being specialized for hundreds of years, and like all highly specialized things it can be really bad outside of the context it's for. There's also a reason for most things that actually makes sense: it just might not be obvious or even relevant most of the time.
posted by Gygesringtone at 5:52 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

The thesis of the video is not that notation must die, for those of you, like me, who assumed that it was.

Oh good, I was indeed assuming that was their crotchet.

Give it a thousand more years and perhaps notation will be inflated out of existence.
posted by aws17576 at 6:22 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

This is mistagged, the video is about chess notation. I watched a full 10 minutes of it to be sure, yup, it's all chess.

2001 is a movie about early hominids, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a Busby-Berkeley-style musical set in Shanghai, and A Serious Man is a Yiddish-language folk tale about an elderly couple being visited by what might be a dybbuk.

Actually, the reveal that it begins with a bit of discussion of chess notation (and presumably some equivalencies between chess notation and sheet music) increases my interest in it about threefold. Thanks!

/moderately skilled player of both chess and a few instruments.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:37 PM on February 14 [3 favorites]

All that said, I agree that this video is REALLY good. I do a little theory tutoring for college level courses, and I do get some folks coming in asking about some of the more advanced stuff, but mostly it's theory fundamental students who are coming from a self taught background, so a lot of the questions are about notation stuff that doesn't make sense without more context. I'm going to rewatch this with an eye to exactly what context he give, because like there's some things he skips over, but they all seem like pretty intentional omissions for clarity's sake.
posted by Gygesringtone at 7:40 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

I admired addressing how tabulation teaches you to play music without teaching you music. As someone who has done some pretty deep study with standard notation for piano and bass and a ton of other instruments, and then moving over to guitar where most of what I've learned has been through tabs... Yeah.
posted by hippybear at 8:28 PM on February 14

Classical chess notation is basically dead. It is al algebraic notation now.
posted by interogative mood at 8:49 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

All of Tantracrul's videos are worth a watch - the longer and more detailed the better IMHO. He provides a great summary of why improving standard written musical notation is not at all easy. I think that the conventions that have arrived with computers in the last 40 years or so are an interesting parallel story - and a little more positive. Since the advent of MIDI and then DAWs - there has been a lot of innovation and standardisation of how music is depicted in software: multi-channel scores, loops and so on. This is primarily about control and integration - but it is also a type of higher level notation.
posted by rongorongo at 10:51 PM on February 14 [3 favorites]

I grew up playing guitar and bass in Hong Kong, and as a result came up with chord sheets and jianpu. I actually think jianpu is an ideal system (for stringed instruments and certain styles of music, anyway) as it has many of the advantages of both tab and standard notation. It's really easy to read and to learn to read, easy to write quickly, you end up learning your scales really well through osmosis, and it has standardised timing notation unlike tab (and it's easy to read, as it isn't effectively a separate parallel line of information like timing information in tab usually is), and makes transposing trivial. The only thing it isn't great at is notating complex harmony, if you're after specific voicings. For any music which is based on melody and allows the performer some freedom with the precise voicings of chords, it works wonderfully, such as jazz and popular music, and folk, and pretty much most things that aren't Western art music specifically. Every fake book I ever saw a jazz person with, whether beginner kid or seasoned professional performer, was jianpu with chord sheets, until I moved to Europe.

I'm eternally frustrated that virtually nobody here in the UK is familiar with jianpu.
posted by Dysk at 1:40 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

The thing that brought it all together and got the video to make sense for a friend of mine was "it's file compression".
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:10 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

If we're killing notation can we also kill the C-Major black-keys-white-keys keyboard, thanks.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:44 AM on February 15 [4 favorites]

Notation is primarily valuable when you want to communicate musical ideas as precisely as possible to various performers in a way that is clear and comfortable for them to read. That's why transposition and movable clefs are a thing: to allow for the highest probability that the range of notes on the page will mostly fall on the staff lines and not too far above or below them.

Notation is not critical to creating music, though it can be very valuable for collecting ideas. An extremely large number of your favorite (pop / rock / whatever) musicians don't even know how to write chord charts - they probably have a band member or producer who does that for them. Jazz people are, of course, the exception here.

So re: "notation is confusing" well, yes, it is a technical language that requires study and training.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:41 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

On movable clefs: it kinda blowed my mind when I first learned that the two familar "treble" and "bass" clef symbols were originally moveable: the treble clef symbol is actually just a script G that marks which line stands for "G" (the line that the curvy part spirals around), and the bass clef symbol is an F that marks which line stands for "F" (the line that the two dots are on). (See this Smithsonian article, or wikipedia.)

These days they're almost always used only in one position. Also, a third clef, the "C" clef, is still used, in more than one position, but not as commonly as the other two.

One reason people still practice the rarer clefs, even if they don't personally play an instrument that uses them, is that they enable a trick that makes it easier to transpose on sight (one explanation). Apparently handy if you're, say, an accompanist and a singer hands you a score and says "can we play this in a lower key?". Or if you want to read orchestra scores, which usually include multiple transposing instruments.
posted by bfields at 8:02 AM on February 15

"can we also kill the C-Major black-keys-white-keys keyboard"

There's probably another youtube video somewhere documenting the myriad failed attempts at that.
posted by bfields at 8:09 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

Maybe we can also kill 4/4 time and the wheel while we're at it
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:38 AM on February 15

Without watching the video, even the chess part: notation is useful for the kind of music it evolved for.
posted by madcaptenor at 10:31 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

"can we also kill the C-Major black-keys-white-keys keyboard"

I replaced mine with an A-minor-on-the-white-keys model.
posted by The Half Language Plant at 12:54 PM on February 15 [11 favorites]

I think it would be really difficult to make notation for viola music that's better than using the alto clef and a conventional stave. And it is, as far as I know, the only instrument that routinely uses that clef.

Also, it's not intrinsically difficult to learn to read classical music notation at the same time as learning to play a relevant instrument. It is frustrating if your playing ability is substantially ahead of your reading ability and you're learning notation for the first time. But it's perfectly possible to do, and substantially more logical and ordered than English spelling.
posted by plonkee at 1:24 PM on February 15 [2 favorites]

"How equal temperament ruined harmony (and why you should care)" by Ross W. Duffin:

https://worldcat.org/title/70176904

Which has photographs of various methods of publishing tunings so string players could learn them from a book; but nothing that built the notation of the temperament into the notation for the music, I think.
posted by clew at 8:53 PM on February 15

"can we also kill the C-Major black-keys-white-keys keyboard"

I replaced mine with an A-minor-on-the-white-keys model.

Chromatic button accordions replace the piano keyboard with a couple different options, B-system and C-system (depending on which diagonal is half-steps and which diagonal is whole-steps). There's also the Janko keyboard layout. Black/white key coloring optional.
posted by samw at 9:49 PM on February 15 [2 favorites]

Great video. Haven't watched it all the way yet but it strikes me that most of the alternative notation systems are only good for a single instrument playing fairly simple music.

There's probably an argument that the barrier for a complete beginner to play something resembling music should be as low as possible, and that's where I think some of the alternative systems might have an edge. I like how guitar tab has encouraged a whole lot of people to noodle around on guitar. Sure, maybe the music they can play is a little more limited, but at least they started and are making music, which they wouldn't otherwise be if they had to learn what a bunch of dots and lines mean first. I think there has been some elitism in the form of "if you can't read music, you're not a real musician" but that's to do with snobbery not the notation itself

But yeah, there'll be a problem when the musician's ability reaches the limit of the simple notation. Maybe by then they'll be invested enough in the instrument to learn the standard notation?
posted by pianissimo at 2:37 AM on February 16 [1 favorite]

But yeah, there'll be a problem when the musician's ability reaches the limit of the simple notation.

You do realise that there are celebrated and accomplished musicians that do not read standard notation, right? Some of them don't read any notation. Not uncommon in rock music, dance music, punk, folk, metal, etc. Sure, lots of people in those genres can read standard notation, but it is absolutely not limiting to know a different or no notation system, unless you consider western art music (or jazz?) to be somehow above other forms of music.
posted by Dysk at 7:17 AM on February 16 [1 favorite]

(I also think there's a philosophical difference between genres/musics that have developed after the advent of recorded music, and those with a tradition established before. In a western art music tradition, the score is the canonical version of a piece. In that context, tablature probably seems incredibly primitive: it cannot capture timing information accurately, cannot easily render music for every ensemble member, cannot be sight read as easily, etc, etc, etc. But in e.g. rock music, the score is not definitive. It may not even exist. The original recording is definitive. It doesn't matter if your textual rendering doesn't capture all the information, because you can just listen to the record. The function of tab in this context is not to encode the music, as it is for standard notation in western art music, but to serve as a learning or memory aid, to help you translate the recorded sound you're hearing to a set of physical actions you can replicate, in tandem with having access to the recording. You can get timing information by listening to the recording, you can get tone information from the recording (and standard notation cannot help with that either), phrasing, etc. Music theory and education kind of still retains western art music's cult of the score, but that isn't relevant to how most other musics operate.)
posted by Dysk at 7:32 AM on February 16

And I know people learning in traditions that don’t count recordings as authoritative. The realest version is the one the most people around you can play along with (if I understand this right). That’s probably the one you learned from the oldest best regarded player in your region, but catchy variations can win. Very evolutionary.
posted by clew at 9:50 AM on February 16 [1 favorite]

Not for nothing, but it's mentioned in the video that he's specifically talking about the utility of notation in western art music but that he recognizes that all types of music are equally worth while. (Yeah, I'm not a fan of that being contained in quick second long block of text rather than being said out-loud but tubers gonna tube). Sometimes conversations can be about just one genre without that implying the participants don't care about other genres. Sometimes people just want to geek out about a type music they love without having to preface every statement with "I know that other music is just as good", and I know that there is a history of Music Academics looking down on non-western art music genres, but I don't think there's any reason to suspect that's what's going on here.
posted by Gygesringtone at 1:21 PM on February 16

I'm not sure I fully buy that we're just talking about western art music when the conversation turns to people learning music through guitar tablature, which is largely used for genres specifically outside that tradition, and treating that learning as "more limited" until they "reach the limits of the notation" as if moving from other genres into western art music necessarily represents growth as an artist, and dedication to an instrument. It implicitly treats guitar music in traditions that use tablature as lesser.
posted by Dysk at 1:30 PM on February 16

It implicitly treats guitar music in traditions that use tablature as lesser.

I think that, in my experience, tablature is lesser only insofar as it isn't as complete a communication of what the music is actually doing, and actually needs to be complemented with direct instruction of some sort. It's a perfectly cromulent way to learn how to play a piece, although it doesn't contain much in the way of timing in the notation. But as far as being able to get the fingers to execute the maneuvers required, there is probably no better way to learn.

Standard notation is different from tablature insofar as someone who has NEVER heard the work before could probably create something close to a "good performance" by reading the sheet music. But what they won't have, unless it's included, would be any indication at all about HOW to execute the music.

When I was studying piano pretty seriously, I'd be told to go out and buy X edition of "Sonatas by Y" because that would be the edition that had the editorial marks, ones added later not included by the composer, that my teacher wanted to use. The specific fingerings used to execute specific passages, stuff like that, that can ALL be included in book of piano sheet music, but it is not intrinsic to the notes on the page.

Anyway, on top of this, music lessons, and even practice sessions, were done with a pencil nearby because you DO need to be reminded to hit that one note with that specific finger in order to get the rest of the run to work.

So in this way, standard notation is a step lower than tablature, because tab is a map of the strategy of how to play the piece.

The part that I've discovered in my own music explorations where tab comes up short is that I can sit down with a guitar and learn a piece using tablature, and be pretty impressive with the result if I work on it for a while. But if I wanted to sit down at a piano and play those same notes? I likely don't have any clue what those notes are, how they relate to notes on a piano, because I've never done deep musical theory study on the guitar and I'm not learning from notes on a page, which I can read across instruments, I'm learning from tab, which relates to one instrument only.

Anyway, I don't think that there's anything lesser about guitar music that use tablature, because those traditions likely have a much more rich tradition of master/apprentice or other learning structures which may not exist in the same way in other cultures. But the information density in tablature is quite different from standard notation, and is focussed on execution.
posted by hippybear at 2:00 PM on February 16

But the information density in tablature is quite different from standard notation, and is focussed on execution.

Yes, because tablature in modern popular musics generally comes with the expectation that you'll also have access to the definitive recording of the piece. Tablature lacks the information because it's too some extent redundant when you can listen to and play along with a recording. It's an aid to learning by ear (and to a certain extent, one you're meant to outgrow, but not by moving to standard notation, by moving beyond the need for notation.)
posted by Dysk at 2:10 PM on February 16

But now you're talking at cross purposes because you're suddenly mentioning having the definitive recording of the piece, when previously, the comment to which I was responding, to which I tried to actually interact with in my comment, tried to include non-western traditions that would extend back before and exist well outside the western recorded music tablature tradition.

I'm not sure what you're wanting to argue, other than to say that tab is useful and good. Which I'm agreeing with.
posted by hippybear at 2:24 PM on February 16

I'm not sure I fully buy that we're just talking about western art music when the conversation turns to people learning music through guitar tablature

I just rewatched the part of the video about tabulator, which if you haven't, he starts by praising tab and mentions that part of his work involves guitar tabs as well as standard notation, and it's still just a small part of a video talking about the limitations of the different notation systems for western art music. There's just as long of a look at keyboard tablature. So he's talking about tablatures in general, not specific genres of music where guitar players might use tabs.

I can see that there's a conversation you're wanting to have, and it's actually a pretty interesting one, but it's not the conversation we were having before. Ya know?
posted by Gygesringtone at 2:32 PM on February 16

Yeah, I was responding to pianissimo's comment initially, and it is the context of that comment that guitar tablature is treated as a lesser stepping stone (and thus implicitly modern popular genres where tablature is dominant), not tantacrul's video, so I think this is more a case of context/scope confusion on this tangent.
posted by Dysk at 2:57 PM on February 16

You do realise that there are celebrated and accomplished musicians that do not read standard notation, right? Some of them don't read any notation

I also called it snobbery when people think that you have to read music (standard notation) in order to be a "real" musician. So yes I do realise this.

I probably shouldn't have said it was the musician's ability that outstrips the notation though. Maybe the musician doesn't have the particular skills to learn a whole piece by ear, or tab + listening to the recording and/or improvise completely, and relies on having everything written out*. And then maybe they find that what they want to play is a bit harder to parse in tab than what they've been playing up till then. Can it still be done? Sure! But IIRC the video makes the point that it can be difficult.

I extrapolated in my mind that maybe some people would give up at that point and not learn to play the pieces that are harder to read in tab. Granted, those pieces might be hard to learn in any case so you might be right, it's not the notation that's the limiting factor. I'm happy to be corrected on that. But I honestly don't think and did not mean to imply that tab is good enough for rock guitar but if you want to be a Serious Muso, you have to learn standard notation.

*Playing from sheet music (however notated), especially sight reading, is a skill. Playing without the aid of sheet music is a different skill. There are circumstances where each will be the more useful one to possess. Of course many folks can do both.
posted by pianissimo at 6:49 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]

As someone who used to sight read a lot, it's not just a specific skill, it's a really eerie skill. Like, if you're in the flow, you're seeing and playing things before you're even really thinking about what you're doing. I was doing a LOT of accompaniment and other things that required basically sight reading all the time, and even despite all the video talking about the difference between the standard notation and the player piano notation, being able to read standard notation as if it were text on a page, as a pianist, feels a bit like being fed a piano player roll at times.
posted by hippybear at 7:01 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]

Adam Neely's take on the "do musicians need to be able to read standard notation?" debate.
posted by samw at 9:11 PM on February 16

So I've been thinking about this post off and discussion off and on for awhile, and I think the biggest missing elements is the video is of the note values vs. beat vs. meter. He touches on it briefly when talking about guitar hero, but other than that most of the focus seems to be on readability of note length in different systems. Which is important from a performer point of view, and since the main thrust of the video was about readability, totally makes sense. The thing is though, they are really the weak spot. Which, if you know anything about Western Art Music history makes sense, rhythm was generally seen as not as interesting as harmony and melody.

To define how I'm using the terms, because things can get a little squishy around beat and meter especially: note values are how long the notes are in relationship to each other, the beat is how long a note lasts in time, and the meter is just the groove: it's notes how notes are grouped together and which notes get accented or de-emphasized.

Now note lengths might seem like the easiest of the three: two eighth-notes = one quarter note. Boom. done. But wait, does that mean the two eight-notes are equal length? Most of the time it does, but sometimes you swing the notes, cause you're playing a third stream piece and sometimes they're notes inégales and in either case you just kind of have to know that one is longer than the other by some amount, which changes depending on context. And there's all sorts of performance practice things like that, a dotted eighth-sixteenth pair is always gonna have a 3:1 relationship, except when it has a 7:1 relationship.

O.k. but surely the beat is relatively stable. Baring human error and explicate tempo changes, that should stay the same, right? There's a French tempo marking that translates to "with good taste". I'll just leave that fact and let you draw your own conclusions.

And then there's meter. O.k. this should be easy, there's clues all over the place about this one, time signatures, how many eight notes are grouped together, even accents. But like a waltz's three-four is different than a Saraband's three-four is different than a sacred piece written in three. And they're all gonna look pretty similar in terms of eight note groupings, etc. Then there is the huge number of sections of pieces in 2 or 3 that I've had to write "N1" because the conductor couldn't move his arm quick enough to do each beat. Does that change the meter? Yup.

So I don't know, common notation IS much easier for reading Western Art Music, especially on sight, but man does it get messy really quick when it comes to notating rhythm.
posted by Gygesringtone at 8:47 AM on February 17 [1 favorite]

"The thing is though, they are really the weak spot. Which, if you know anything about Western Art Music history makes sense, rhythm was generally seen as not as interesting as harmony and melody."

Yeah, though note most of your examples are actually taken from western art music itself. So there are apparently timing things that musicians in that tradition care about that aren't captured.

Are there examples of systems that do better?

I wonder if the failures here aren't so much down to the neglect of rhythm in western art music as they to just that these are inherently difficult problems for notation, and, no matter what the tradition, this is an area where players are going to have to fill in the gaps based on experience.
posted by bfields at 8:19 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]

Pretty good video.
I learned standard piano notation as a kid, but could never play much 'at speed'.
A guy I know wrote a program for ukulele sheet music, and it included [uke] tablature.
It's petty good, but there's no easy way to indicate tempo or duration.
No perfect notation for all cases...

As far as chess goes, I learned English Descriptive Notation as a kid and used it until the 80's. Chess Life magazine for a while had a policy that they would use either descriptive or algebraic depending on the wishes of the article's author, but then they went all-in with algebraic. I think it was a business decision. There were hundreds of books out there in descriptive, and so all you had to do to write a new book is convert, say, My System to algebraic, and you have an easy book to write. (and for the USCF to sell...)
I used algebraic for a while but for various reasons switched back to descriptive back around the turn of the century.

I know for sure that algebraic is easier- I was recently going through my copy of 'The Art of Checkmate', and made all kinds of mistakes going through games- but I wondered how the notation was affecting my play. When I was using descriptive, I used to be able to play a game 'blindfold', and after I switched to algebraic, I could not do that any more. That could easily be because that's easier to do at 20 than at 50, but it's certainly possible that it was due to the way the board is described.
Also, it really pissed me off that the USCF demanded I use algebraic in keeping my own game score. So I was going to be subversive. I haven't played in tournaments lately, but decided that if I was required to use algebraic, I would use German or Spanish algebraic.
1. e4 e5 2. Cf3 Cc6 3.Ac4 Ac5
No reason to help my opponents (I have certainly witnessed my opponents looking at my score when they forgot to write something down on their own) and it's still a perfect representation of the game.
posted by MtDewd at 4:59 PM on February 18

I wonder if the failures here aren't so much down to the neglect of rhythm in western art music as they to just that these are inherently difficult problems for notation...

I've got 4-5 college level music theory books within eyesight, plus another handful of orchestration books, and I would wager that across the board there is probably at most a 3:1 ratio of pages spent on harmony to rhythm/meter. Most of that will be in the first few chapters about "reading music". And I mean, I'm sure if I dug around I could find exceptions to that, and I bet it'd be mostly in texts about performance practice.

I don't know, I can only speak to my own experience, but I have spent the better part of my life learning, performing, and thinking about music, in a wide variety of genres and settings, and the conversation around Western Art music in general just doesn't concern itself with rhythm as much as it does in other styles.
posted by Gygesringtone at 8:18 AM on February 19 [1 favorite]