[Smt-talk] the impossibility of listening

[Daniel Wolf]

There is useful analysis of music and the context of music making to be  
made with or without examples in musical notation, but there is an  
academic publishing trend, now perhaps twp decades old, in which  
publishers view the presence of notation as a negative sales point.  (In  
the past, notation was a real production cost, but that is much less the  
case today with computer based notation and book design.)  This trend is  
particularly in evidence for books which are intended to reach the  
undergraduate library, for example those submitted to and selected for  
reviews by Choice, which can have a make-or-break impact on undergraduate  
library sales.  A positive review in Choice may carry with it sales of 500  
to 1000 copies, enough to make an academic title profitable.  Somehow, a  
informal consensus appears to have arisen among reviewers and librarians  
that undergraduates will not or cannot read a book on music with notation  
in it*, and several publishers have accepted this consensus by forbidding  
their writers to include anything suspended on five lines.

As musicians and musical scholars, I believe that some push back against  
this trend is in order.  While there may well be some decline in general  
notational literacy, is this a trend we can support as teachers,  
intellectuals, or musicians?  It might put things in some perspective to  
consider that, in the 1930s, Nicolas Slonimsky had a weekly column on the  
children's page of The Christian Science Monitor, regularly including  
sophisticated notational examples — many of frankly experimental music —  
intended for school children to play at home. Not having access to a good  
score library as a youth, a good part of my musical education came from  
closely studying all the snippets of music notation that I found in works  
of music history or theory.  Again, I don't believe that every book of  
music analysis requires notation, bu I honestly think we're losing much  
and gaining nothing by accepting this trend.

(Dr) Daniel Wolf
composer
Frankfurt am Main
renewablemusic.blogspot.com
djwolf at snafu.de



______
* A prejudice with regard to the music reading abilities of undergraduates  
may not be unusual.  An anecdote. As an upper division undergrad, I worked  
as a reader and TA for large introductory music classes and was asked to  
run the AV for a regional AMS conference.  A certain famous musicology  
professor from Berkeley gave a paper and, before the session, he came into  
the projection booth and asked me to step aside from the projector and  
cassette machine so that a pair of his PhD students could take over. He  
explained "They are _Graduate_ students. They can _read_ music."  I  
countered that, although only an undergrad, I was able to read music and,  
perhaps more critically, was familiar with the machines at hand, which  
were known to be a little sensitive.  At the very least, I could stick  
around in case there was a problem.  I was told, in no uncertain terms,  
that, as an undergraduate, I couldn't possibly read well enough to flip  
slides of the score as the music played and that I ought to exit the booth.

Things did not go well.  And by not going well, imagine a projection booth  
gradually filling with slides of scores which have shot out of the slide  
projector like little missiles and a cassette machine eagerly consuming  
tape and playing back sounds which might have been appropriate to a  
presentation on musique concrete.  This, however, was a presentation on  
mid-18th century music theatre.  I concluded that, if this was the added  
value to score reading brought by graduate study in musicology, graduate  
study in musicology was probably not my thing.