I love music. Most especially, I love sheet music. Before coming to BYU, I gathered every Elton John, Jon Schmidt, and every Broadway songbooks that I could stuff into one crate. The concept of spreading musical knowledge of sheet music has been one that I am personally grateful for. It’s one thing to hear “Piano Man”, but to actually take part in performing it with my own personal interpretation creates a joy beyond compare.
For this reason I decided to make my blog post about ancient musical notation. In a way, music encompasses all forms of knowledge (folk, oral, written, digital). Today I’d like to focus on the written from of music. ( Below is a sample a Ancient Greek musical notation.)
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. And so began my internet search for the oldest piece of musical notation. I found the Seikilos Epitaph which is an ancient tomb near Turkey (shown in the image at the start of this post). This tomb contains an engraving of the oldest full musical composition ever discovered. The tune is simple and somewhat illogical, but that’s to be expected from ancient times. As Alex pointed out in his post, writing mediums play a big role in determining the sophistication of a written piece. The epitaph was engraved in stone which is a difficult medium to record written information.
The epitaph proved that in order for music to endure, it must be written down. Ancient civilizations didn’t have the modern convenience of audio recordings. So how did familiar tunes spread across civilizations? That’s where the power of musical notation comes in. It allows for civilizations to connect to each other through music.
However, a paradoxical aspect of music is that it can survive without notation as well. The great Jazz musicians incorporated improvisation techniques that allow for more freedom in music without written scales or melodies. All the musician need was chord progression and a general knowledge of the song, and then from there he could create whatever he desired. Music like that can’t be written down, and those who try to duplicate it exactly end up with a cheap rendition of a something pure.
So in conclusion, music sould be recorded almost certainly—just it should be more of a starting point. The best music comes without physical notation but from within the mind and soul of the musician.
I never thought about how being able to record music would change how it was played, or how it was viewed, but that makes a lot of sense. It would require a series of people who could pass the music on by ear to future generations if they wanted to preserve something, instead of being able to send it to all of your friends or keep it in the library. I wonder if the writing down of music happened separately than creating a written language, as it's kind of like a language unto itself.
ReplyDeleteIt is really obvious, but I just made the connection between "record" and like a "vinyl record". It's just like a written record in that it allows you to experience something original over and over again in the (essentially) same way.
ReplyDeleteI love how when you make the connection between a "record" (such as a vinyl record) and to "record" something (document it so that everyone will remember), it makes a song seem so much more than just a song. Because, what are you recording? Not just a song, but a feeling, a story, an expression, a moment shared between the audience and the performers that can now be shared over and over again.
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