At 7:12 AM -0500 5/27/10, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
dhbailey wrote:
Imagine what sort of nightmares musicologists in the 30th century will
have trying to decipher how those lead-sheets would have been performed!
Thanks to the technology of sound recordings, I
expect that musicologists of the 30th century
will have less trouble understanding how to
decipher a lead sheet of the 20th century than
we in the 20th century have understanding music
of the 10th century.
I wouldn't bet on it. Almost my entire "record"
collection is on, well, "records"--vinyl LPs--and
I can't even play them in class because we no
longer have turntables. In fact my Department
has stopped replacing old cassette players, since
it is "outdated technology." And computer music
files made 15 years ago can no longer be accessed
and used by any modern computers as OSs evolve.
And this is exacerbated by the fact that at least
we have a few written descriptions from the 10th
century, and a number of manuscripts in a
notation that while not exact can often be
interpreted, while so much of today's music
exists ONLY as recordings, which are
technology-dependent.
The notated music that we DO have--not from the
10th century, but from the 11th-13th--is in
effect leadsheets, and specialists realize that
performing them exactly as they are on the page
is probably the one way they were NEVER
performed. That's especially true of the secular
repertoire, the Trobador, Trouvère and
Minnisänger repertoire, which are quite literally
nothing but written melodies--lead-sheets for
sure!
But what we DO have today is volumes of writing
ABOUT music and musicians, which if it survives
will give future scholars a better idea of what
was going on day-to-day than we know about the
10th century. And my bet is that what they'll be
studying is NOT the academic "classical" music
that touched few lives, or even the "art" music
of jazz that touched a few more, but the treasure
trove of pop music that indeed touched the most
lives and influenced the largest number of
people, not just artistically but politically and
culturally as well. Now THERE'S a thought to
contemplate! But that's what musicologists do,
concentrate on the FIRST of something, or the
LAST of something, or the most INFLUENTIAL of
something, not the sideshows.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:john.how...@vt.edu)
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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