Good post and I’ll chime in if you don’t mind. I teach this stuff for a living and even highly skilled musicians struggle with it in various ways (myself emphatically included).
The main thing I want to say is that there’s a reason why essentially all music education consists of many years of rote learning. Obviously, that rote learning works better if it’s guided in appropriate directions, but I really don’t know of any alternative to what you describe when you say “an orders-of-magnitude-less-efficient mechanism for memorizing note-to-note mappings for every note and every pair of keys.” I hate to say it, but … yep. [EDIT: eh, let me qualify that a bit. See point (A) below.]
Sight-transposition (i.e. sight-reading plus on-the-fly transposition) is a ninja-level skill. Some instrumentalists (usually those who play non-concert-pitch instruments) can do it reasonably well for at least some transposition intervals, and a few people like professional vocal accompanists and church organists need to be able to do it fluently as an expected part of their job. But outside of those folks, even professional musicians rarely have that facility.
Here’s something that directly supports your point at (D). As you know, pitch intervals in tonal theory are given names that break arithmetic—a second plus a fourth is a fifth, even though 2+4≠5. A certain well-known music theorist often expresses the view that this blatantly illogical convention is almost entirely responsible for the popular perception that music theory is a really, really difficult subject. I think this exaggerates things, but he’s got a point. However, most musicians know those interval names really well and have never thought much about how stupid they are, and so then high-level music theory becomes opaque to skilled musicians because we start by renaming intervals correctly (i.e. a second is diatonic interval 1, and you can add them like normal numbers).
In the case of the frustrating conventions of staff notation, there are historical reasons going back a millennium why we write pitches like that. Various reforms have been proposed, but path-dependency basically makes it impossible that any of them would ever be adopted. Far more likely (and well underway for decades now) is that musicians will stop using notation altogether.
Just to briefly answer your other questions with my personal views:
(A) Personally yes, I have all the note-to-note mappings memorized. I do this completely via thinking in scale degrees. I can name any scale degree in any key, so questions like the one you mentioned just revolve around thinking “B-flat is scale-degree 4 in F major. What’s scale-degree 4 in C or A-flat?”
(B) Yes, I do think this is plausible, and underappreciated in the specific case of music, since most musicians don’t think much about the ways in which notation isn’t an optimized system.
(C) Maybe this is too glib, but … social interaction? “Overthinking it” isn’t a path to doing well in social settings. For that matter, natural language might be another. In many respects it’s best learned by rote (along with some theory—just like music) but I’ve certainly had classmates in language courses who get too hung up on the illogic of grammar to progress well in basic skills like speaking and listening comprehension.
In the case of the frustrating conventions of staff notation, there are historical reasons going back a millennium why we write pitches like that. Various reforms have been proposed, but path-dependency basically makes it impossible that any of them would ever be adopted
I know very little about this, but I have noticed guitar tabs, ocarina fingering guides, mouth harp tabs with simple numbers exist.
Very true. Staff notation essentially says “Here are the pitches and rhythms, now it’s your job to figure out how to make them happen on your instrument.” As you point out, a very real alternative to staff notation exists in tablature, which (in general) is any notation system that instead says “Here’s what you need to do physically on your instrument. Follow these instructions and the notes will automatically be the right ones—you don’t need to worry about what they ‘are’.”
Tablatures are surprisingly old, apparently going back 700 years or so in various forms. Of course, their drawbacks as general musical notation are clear enough. Namely, if you want to understand what’s going on in the music or play music on a different instrument, tablature is really only a kind of lookup table for actual notes, and often a very cumbersome one.
Far more likely (and well underway for decades now) is that musicians will stop using notation altogether.
This seems like a radical claim. Can you clarify or elaborate? I certainly don’t plan on stopping using notation any time soon. Indeed, this sort of statement seems to imply that composition as we most typically understand it (where a “composer” creates a “work” which nonidentical performances may be understood to be realizations “of”, to possibly varying degrees of “accuracy”) will stop, which seems highly unlikely to me.
(I realize you only stated it as a comparative—that this is more likely than some other unlikely thing—but the “underway for decades now” comment suggests you take this as a serious possibility.)
I actually like musical notation, and wish that its expressive possibilities were exploited (even) more. (However, I’m with you on interval nomenclature.)
I didn’t have anything really radical in mind. I think it’s pretty clear that there’s a long-term trend toward high-level music-making relying on notation to a decreasing extent. I have a number of friends who are professional composers, and some of them use notation to write for instruments, while others use electronics and largely don’t use notation at all. (The latter group, who compose for video games, movies, etc., are the ones who actually make money at it, so I’m by no means just talking about avant-garde electronic music.) A lot of commercial composers who would have been using paper and pencil 30 years ago are using Logic or Digital Performer today.
The other factor, of course, is that notated genres of music (“classical” music and its descendants, and some others) are increasingly marginal in Western culture. This trend is often way overblown, but is clearly visible at the timescale of decades or longer.
What I certainly don’t mean to suggest is that individuals who use notation in our musical lives, like you or me, will stop using it. It’ll be a cohort replacement effect, and no doubt a very gradual one. Nor do I think that music notation will entirely go away at some foreseeable point in the future. But reading and using it will slowly become a more specialized skill. My impression, though I don’t have a reference for this and could be completely wrong, that the ability of American adults (not pro musicians) to read music notation with some fluency has hugely declined over the last half-century.
All this is very much the framing argument of Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, with its much-criticized focus on what he calls the “literate [his needlessly inflammatory term for ‘notated’] traditions” of music. Within that frame, he casts the present day as essentially an “end-of-history” moment.
Correct me where I’m wrong here! I’m not a specialist in these issues.
Let me add that, like you, I absolutely love music notation, borderline fetishize it, and say all this with more than a trace of a Luddite’s sadness.
Nor do I think that music notation will entirely go away at some foreseeable point in the future. But reading and using it will slowly become a more specialized skill
That I find more believable; but specialization is probably the wave of the future in general. I’m much more bothered by the prospect of interesting things dying out completely than that of their being “restricted” to a (possibly vibrant and vigorous) subculture. (These days I tend to think that most of “real” life takes place in subcultures or smallish communities—maybe even cults! -- anyway.)
My impression...that the ability of American adults (not pro musicians) to read music notation with some fluency has hugely declined over the last half-century
I don’t myself have enough data to confirm or deny this (I’m not a specialist in such topics either), but one should make sure to take into account the rest of the world: I have the impression, for example, that the Western art music tradition is currently in ascendance in China.
(I also suspect in general that people’s impressions of what past populations were like are biased toward reflecting the elites of past populations, about which information tends to be more readily and reliably transmitted, which they then compare to a more general cross-section of the current population visible to them.)
Good post and I’ll chime in if you don’t mind. I teach this stuff for a living and even highly skilled musicians struggle with it in various ways (myself emphatically included).
The main thing I want to say is that there’s a reason why essentially all music education consists of many years of rote learning. Obviously, that rote learning works better if it’s guided in appropriate directions, but I really don’t know of any alternative to what you describe when you say “an orders-of-magnitude-less-efficient mechanism for memorizing note-to-note mappings for every note and every pair of keys.” I hate to say it, but … yep. [EDIT: eh, let me qualify that a bit. See point (A) below.]
Sight-transposition (i.e. sight-reading plus on-the-fly transposition) is a ninja-level skill. Some instrumentalists (usually those who play non-concert-pitch instruments) can do it reasonably well for at least some transposition intervals, and a few people like professional vocal accompanists and church organists need to be able to do it fluently as an expected part of their job. But outside of those folks, even professional musicians rarely have that facility.
Here’s something that directly supports your point at (D). As you know, pitch intervals in tonal theory are given names that break arithmetic—a second plus a fourth is a fifth, even though 2+4≠5. A certain well-known music theorist often expresses the view that this blatantly illogical convention is almost entirely responsible for the popular perception that music theory is a really, really difficult subject. I think this exaggerates things, but he’s got a point. However, most musicians know those interval names really well and have never thought much about how stupid they are, and so then high-level music theory becomes opaque to skilled musicians because we start by renaming intervals correctly (i.e. a second is diatonic interval 1, and you can add them like normal numbers).
In the case of the frustrating conventions of staff notation, there are historical reasons going back a millennium why we write pitches like that. Various reforms have been proposed, but path-dependency basically makes it impossible that any of them would ever be adopted. Far more likely (and well underway for decades now) is that musicians will stop using notation altogether.
Just to briefly answer your other questions with my personal views:
(A) Personally yes, I have all the note-to-note mappings memorized. I do this completely via thinking in scale degrees. I can name any scale degree in any key, so questions like the one you mentioned just revolve around thinking “B-flat is scale-degree 4 in F major. What’s scale-degree 4 in C or A-flat?”
(B) Yes, I do think this is plausible, and underappreciated in the specific case of music, since most musicians don’t think much about the ways in which notation isn’t an optimized system.
(C) Maybe this is too glib, but … social interaction? “Overthinking it” isn’t a path to doing well in social settings. For that matter, natural language might be another. In many respects it’s best learned by rote (along with some theory—just like music) but I’ve certainly had classmates in language courses who get too hung up on the illogic of grammar to progress well in basic skills like speaking and listening comprehension.
I know very little about this, but I have noticed guitar tabs, ocarina fingering guides, mouth harp tabs with simple numbers exist.
Very true. Staff notation essentially says “Here are the pitches and rhythms, now it’s your job to figure out how to make them happen on your instrument.” As you point out, a very real alternative to staff notation exists in tablature, which (in general) is any notation system that instead says “Here’s what you need to do physically on your instrument. Follow these instructions and the notes will automatically be the right ones—you don’t need to worry about what they ‘are’.”
Tablatures are surprisingly old, apparently going back 700 years or so in various forms. Of course, their drawbacks as general musical notation are clear enough. Namely, if you want to understand what’s going on in the music or play music on a different instrument, tablature is really only a kind of lookup table for actual notes, and often a very cumbersome one.
This seems like a radical claim. Can you clarify or elaborate? I certainly don’t plan on stopping using notation any time soon. Indeed, this sort of statement seems to imply that composition as we most typically understand it (where a “composer” creates a “work” which nonidentical performances may be understood to be realizations “of”, to possibly varying degrees of “accuracy”) will stop, which seems highly unlikely to me.
(I realize you only stated it as a comparative—that this is more likely than some other unlikely thing—but the “underway for decades now” comment suggests you take this as a serious possibility.)
I actually like musical notation, and wish that its expressive possibilities were exploited (even) more. (However, I’m with you on interval nomenclature.)
I didn’t have anything really radical in mind. I think it’s pretty clear that there’s a long-term trend toward high-level music-making relying on notation to a decreasing extent. I have a number of friends who are professional composers, and some of them use notation to write for instruments, while others use electronics and largely don’t use notation at all. (The latter group, who compose for video games, movies, etc., are the ones who actually make money at it, so I’m by no means just talking about avant-garde electronic music.) A lot of commercial composers who would have been using paper and pencil 30 years ago are using Logic or Digital Performer today.
The other factor, of course, is that notated genres of music (“classical” music and its descendants, and some others) are increasingly marginal in Western culture. This trend is often way overblown, but is clearly visible at the timescale of decades or longer.
What I certainly don’t mean to suggest is that individuals who use notation in our musical lives, like you or me, will stop using it. It’ll be a cohort replacement effect, and no doubt a very gradual one. Nor do I think that music notation will entirely go away at some foreseeable point in the future. But reading and using it will slowly become a more specialized skill. My impression, though I don’t have a reference for this and could be completely wrong, that the ability of American adults (not pro musicians) to read music notation with some fluency has hugely declined over the last half-century.
All this is very much the framing argument of Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, with its much-criticized focus on what he calls the “literate [his needlessly inflammatory term for ‘notated’] traditions” of music. Within that frame, he casts the present day as essentially an “end-of-history” moment.
Correct me where I’m wrong here! I’m not a specialist in these issues.
Let me add that, like you, I absolutely love music notation, borderline fetishize it, and say all this with more than a trace of a Luddite’s sadness.
That I find more believable; but specialization is probably the wave of the future in general. I’m much more bothered by the prospect of interesting things dying out completely than that of their being “restricted” to a (possibly vibrant and vigorous) subculture. (These days I tend to think that most of “real” life takes place in subcultures or smallish communities—maybe even cults! -- anyway.)
I don’t myself have enough data to confirm or deny this (I’m not a specialist in such topics either), but one should make sure to take into account the rest of the world: I have the impression, for example, that the Western art music tradition is currently in ascendance in China.
(I also suspect in general that people’s impressions of what past populations were like are biased toward reflecting the elites of past populations, about which information tends to be more readily and reliably transmitted, which they then compare to a more general cross-section of the current population visible to them.)
Agreed on all this.