Music on paper -

Many people these days learn to play music by watching musicians perform on videos or listening over and over to recordings of something they’d like to play. We can watch a performer’s actions, or listen carefully and pick up subtleties by hearing.

In the past, composers couldn’t play for people far from where they lived and so systems for communicating music by writing on paper were used to let people who were distant, or people to come in the future, know how the music went. Think Mozart and Beethoven. Folk music was transferred from person to person and was maintained in the public awareness not so much by writing it down, but just by memory and/or sharing. Think Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, or school anthems or patriotic songs.

Personally, I think instrumental and vocal music learned by ear sounds better than music learned off of paper. This is in general and not in all cases, but it seems less contained and more expressive.

That said, I’m fascinated by written music. I’m speaking of the western tradition, the only one I know, sheet music with the black flagged dots for notes and the five-lined graphs.

It interests me that visual communication can be used to produce auditory experience, and that anyone trained to read music could produce the original sounds without having ever heard the piece before. Just the appearance of the clefs, the lines and dots can convey some of the physics of sound – you visually see the distance between two melodic sounds. I can read music on a primitive level but how wonderful to be experienced to where by looking at some dots, lines, and squiggles on a page of paper, you could without previous exposure hear the composer’s music in your mind.

Usually, a composer starts with a melody he or she has tinkered with, and then writes it down. It would be fun, though, to experiment with composing a piece by drawing something visually satisfying – varying the number of notes per bar – creating a pattern of lines and dots – then hearing how it sounds.

I know there is now computer software that offers this experience – and it’d be cool to play with that. But give me white paper and the black ink and let’s play with a 2-dimensional motionless silent piece of paper. Let’s draw something visual that translates into something for the ears, into a range of sounds moving across an expanded period of time.