From: Bill Spight (bspight@pacbell.net)
Date: Sat 02 Jul 2005 - 21:56:49 GMT
Dear Kate,
> The score doesn't tell you how to play the piano, but if you can
> already play the piano then it tells you all you need to know about
> the music - unlike the recording, from which you can infer only
> incomplete and sometimes incorrect information about the music.
As a semi-professional musician, I must demur. All of the information in
the score is in the recording, and more. A score must be interpreted,
which involves inference. If you regard music as some ideal in the mind
of the composer (not my view), then consider what Milton Babbitt said
about why he turned to electronic music: Electronic music gave him the
control he needed so that he could actually hear his music just like he
heard it in his head. (I can sympathize, having once written a short
string quartet I could not get anyone even to attempt, not because it
was technically difficult, but because it was too unfamiliar.) Babbitt's
tapes were better representations of what he imagined than scores would
have been.
Have you ever seen scores of traditional folk songs? The ones I have
seen have been inadequate. You really want the recordings. Such songs
have been passed down for centuries without the aid of scores. Do you
think that there was nothing memetic about that transmission?
Best regards,
Bill
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat 02 Jul 2005 - 22:16:22 GMT