Minuet and Stuff…
(Disclaimer: It is absolutely possible that I have no Idea what I am writing about…)
I still don’t fully understand how but I have started to take piano lessons. Several people were involved and I can not thank them enough for making my childhood dream come true.
Music is fascinating on so many levels… exploring its world from (for me) new perspective, I will now share several thoughts.
Notation
Looking at musical notation as a computer scientist I see something like a formalism that lets me express thoughts and then someone (or something) interpret them. Single, unified form of communication, way to preserve and transfer thoughts. Source code if you like.
But the world is little more complex than that. Analogy with source code goes a little further than that. Just as there is no single programming language, everybody is free do develop their own way of notation. And just like with programming languages, once you know principles, you are (with some effort) able to understand most of them (up to some esoteric stuff).
Of course the analogy is not perfect. For example beauty is often in variations of interpretations (whereas interpretation of code is usually more strict). Little (one might say) imperfections that make difference between what would software generate and what would professional pianist produce is what makes it unique and beautiful. (Even though software is probably getting there.)
And speaking of variations of the notations. Computer scientists and/or programmers are people who like formalisms and so they too took the challenge and created several of their own. I used to find it hard not to try to create some kind of formalism myself. Well, until I tried to typeset some (rather uncomplicated) music using some of existing notations (LilyPond, ABC 2, even some MIDI).
It helped me realize that the usual musical notation is optimized for reading. There are some basic components (notes, rests, …) but then there is whole zoo of high-level symbols expressing some kind of complex things. And that can be binding. On the one hand, it is convenient for reading, but on the other hand, you need special symbol for everything as they usually do not compose well.
Interesting thoughts related to this:
Chiptune: Pushing the Limits Using Constraints
Variations
Let us have a look at Minuet in G major, BWV Anh. 114. If you don’t know it:
The piece is simple enough to be recommended for beginners such as myself. Yet trying to use ABC Notation I have very soon hit some hurdles (may have been caused by my lack of familiarity with the notation and/or musical theory). Here is my attempt that took some non-trivial time.
Fingering and some notations are actually work of my teacher. She enhanced the one that I have randomly downloaded from the internet and brought with me to the lesson. Then I have learned that typesetting music can be as complex as with text. When they are preparing a book with sheet music, editors usually have to think hard to use current notation to express the piece in “the right way”, whatever that in particular context means.
Another funny thing is that quite a lot of notation in this transcription is somewhat redundant once you know that it is baroque. For example most of slurs could have been left out as legato was implied over steps and skips in music from that era (and probably would not be used in the original). Nevertheless, music notations are made to be convenient for reading… so some extra symbols can become handy to remind someone who does not happen to know this. And also with annotation being more explicit it is much easier to interpret the music with computer.
Fingering
Another interesting thing is fingering. One might be inclined to think that there is some canonical fingering, probably backed by a model of hands and instrument or something… yet as it turns out, there is not. It is usually up to editor to decide this. And then the interpreter can find out that he does not like it and not use it at all.
To make things even more confusing, sometimes editor might use less natural fingering to force interpreter to make slight pauses, somehow “helping” with final impression.
Conclusion
When learning music it is good to ask questions (“why is it this way?”, …), but
always be prepared that the best answer you can get is “because it is more
convenient this way, …”. And it is not necessarily a bad thing :-).