mark indigo -> RE: Manuscript paper (Aug. 8 2019 16:19:02)
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quote:
Does anyone use manuscript paper to write down Flamenco any more When I started reading to this point I thought "of course not, obsolete technology, just use audio recordings...." This is something I've thought about before, that written notation was invented to store music over time and communicate it over distances before audio recordings were invented. If musicians had had audio recording back then, maybe no-one would have bothered inventing notation.... I used to use tabs, and tried to learn notation, mainly because I didn't think my ears were any good, and because I couldn't work out the notes from recordings at speed. By working on my ears over time, and with software to slow down and loop recordings I don't use tabs anymore. It is no quicker to memorise a transcription than it is to memorise a recording, but memorising the recording creates much stronger memories, and with all the nuances of the recorded sound that are very difficult or impossible to notate. I'm not aware of any flamenco guitarist writing or publishing their compositions, and all transcriptions of their recordings are therefore interpretations (my understanding of western classical music is that the opposite is the case - the composer writes their intention in the score and the musician interprets it in performance). By coincidence I have just finished a book about jazz called "the imperfect art" and the following quote struck me: "...all art from an aural/oral tradition reveals its rigours in ways different from notated/written arts. The absence of a permanent document, whether musical score or printed word, does not indicate that the mental processes involved in the creative act are any less evident in improvised art than in composed art. Improvisation merely changed the time frame of what takes place: it is spontaneous composition. The identity of composer and performer allows this act to take place without the mediation of systems of notation. In fact, such settings call into question Western culture's veneration of the written document, when the creative act itsefl seems to be more central to our appreciation of art. As jazz pianist Erroll Garner once put it: "No one can hear you read music.""
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