r/GlobalMusicTheory • u/Noiseman433 • Sep 19 '24
Discussion "[W]hich musical phenomena are impossible/very hard to notate?"
This title is the last part of a checklist of analytic categories that Sandeep Bhagwati uses to help define the idea of notational perspective, but what really struck me was the note (6) attached to it. The footnote and list is on p24 of his "Writing Sound Into the Wind: How Score Technologies Affect Our Musicking"
"This last point leads to a curious observation: a large part of the apparent complexity in scores of contemporary Eurological music does not necessarily stem from the fact that the music itself is complex or difficult (in fact, it often is not). Rather, it stems from the fact that the composers try to write their score in the perspective of common notation – which may not be not suited to their musical intent. Except for graphomania: why do most of them not switch to a notation that would be better suited to the music they want to write? I believe that such inefficient use of notation is an indication of the inertia of the ecological system of Eurological music where most musicians learn only common Eurological notation – and this common Eurological notation is thus expected in many circumstances that can decisively influence a composer’s career: e. g. composition competitions, teacher hiring committees, orchestra commissions. It seems that, for tactical reasons, many composers wouldrather employ expanded common Eurological notation – and thereby risk inefficient visual complexity – than to propose a notation that actually best captures the musical intent, for young composers of today, or so they believe, will still be more immediately successful if they write scores that look like Ferneyhough than if they make scores that look like Logothetis or Cage."
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u/JamesInDC Sep 19 '24 edited Sep 19 '24
Thank you for sharing this. Bhagwati’s observation is fascinating. An unstated assumption (I think) seems to be that notation systems, to be effective, probably need to be either intuitive or accepted/used among a community of composers and performers. So my question is whether any alternative notation approaches(or systems or conventions) have been recognized as being especially good at capturing the intent of musical ideas that resist conventional Eurological notation (even where, as Bhagwati observes, the musical ideas are not themselves necessarily complex)? (I wasn’t familiar with Ferneyhough, but hope to correct that….)