[Smt-talk] Schenkerian analysis - visual impaired student

[Daniel Wolf]

Braille music notation has, as I understand it, several solutions to  
showing both horizontal and vertical events. Similar to music sequencing  
languages like Formula, HMSL, or CSound score (or, for that matter,  
command-line entry in Finale or text entry in Lily Pond), these involve  
describing single threads of concurrent processes, or "in-accords"  
(usually monophonic, but sometimes including chords in which all tones  
share attack and release), a linear bias which is not, fundamentally,  
alien to the extraction of lines central to Schenker-style analysis.

(The weakness of such concurrent process notations is, of course, that  
they depend upon the storage — in human or machine memory — and later  
concatenation of substantial strings of information, while playing by  
sight from conventional visual notation typically requires the storage and  
concatenation of comparatively short strings; fortunately, it can usually  
be assumed that a user of Braille notation is rather skilled in this kind  
of storage.)

If the goal of teaching Schenker-style analysis is the production of  
graphic notation in a specific visual format, then a visually impaired  
student is clearly going to be disadvantaged.  I am, however, far from  
certain that that is the substantial goal of this form of analysis, and it  
is instead my impression that the goal is a set of listening skills which  
are, secondarily  — but usefully, for communication and pedagogy —,  
registered through the production of a graphic notation.

To the extent that a Schenker-style graph can be considered a formal  
structure, it would appear consequent that there should be an  
indeterminate number of ways of representing that structure, including  
alternative graphic notations and notations which are not at all graphic  
or even visual. And, although a conventional visual format may be familiar  
and functional, it is not essential, and it can be replaced by alternative  
representations without loss of information, and, in principle, it must be  
possible to do this in Braille notation, perhaps in combination with  
literary Braille characters, and certainly taking advantage of the the  
spatial elements of Braille which are already similar to conventional  
music notation — the left to right representation of time, and, in some  
cases, the representation of simultaneities through vertically separated  
bar-over-bar format.   (Indeed, working examples of alternative formats  
would be highly suggestive of the robustness of the analytic technique!)

A teacher who is not fluent in Braille notation is, of course, somewhat  
disadvantaged in evaluating a student's work. However, if a student is  
also required to produce a narrative description accompanying his or her  
analysis, perhaps this would be an acceptable form of bridging notations.

Daniel Wolf
composer
Frankfurt am Main