I've played various musical instruments for nearly 40 years now, but some simple things remain beyond my grasp. Most frustrating is sight reading while playing piano. Though I've tried for years, I can't read bass and treble clef at the same time. To sight-read piano music, when you see this:
you need your right hand to read it as C D E F, but your left hand to read it as E F G A. To this day, I can't do it, and I can only learn piano music by learning the treble and bass clef parts separately to the point where I don't rely on the score for more than reminders, then playing them together.
Transposing is also approximately impossible for me. The musical scale is drawn as a linear scale, but it isn't linear. There are missing steps between B and C and between E and F; B# = C and E# = F [1]. So C D E F, transposed into the key of B, becomes B C# D# E [2]. Transposing music that uses notes outside the scale is significantly worse. The only way I can transpose (badly) is to not look at the music and not think about the names of the notes.
I've blamed myself for lacking some ability that would enable me to do these things. But my conversations with (a few) people who can do these things have been peculiar. They don't have any suggestions for my problem, because they never saw them as problems in the first place. When I talked about the inconsistency of trying to use separate notations for the left and right hand, they stared at me uncomprehendingly. The idea that notations should be consistent seemed never to have occurred to them.
So I've decided to blame them instead. The problem is that my mind is too highly trained.
No, seriously. I realize this is probably an unhelpful, self-defeating attitude. But is it correct?
It seems to me that if you're in the habit of working with things on linear scales, that's going to be a hindrance when you try to transpose music. Your brain latches onto the notes marked on the score and automatically constructs an internal representation that is wrong. Likewise, if you're in the habit of looking for consistent interpretations of data and compressing what you observe, your mind will keep trying to reduce the two clef notations down to one.
The system of sharps and flats is efficient in some ways; you just have to remember the order they always occur in, plus one number per scale (the number of sharps and flats), to construct that scale. You organize the music into concepts like "scale" and "chord", and map those into new keys. It's great if you're playing scales and simple chords, and if your music sticks to a few basic keys plus their minors. But it sucks when you move beyond that.
The notations developed for music work best if you don't aggressively systematize data, so that you can instead learn an orders-of-magnitude-less-efficient mechanism for memorizing note-to-note mappings for every note and every pair of keys [3], and so that your brain doesn't try to let your left know what your right hand is doing.
(A) If you can transpose music on the fly, have you got the note-to-note mappings memorized? Can you say without thinking what B flat is when transposed from the key of F to the key of C? Of A flat?
(B) Do you think this is plausible--that a very general ability or learned skill can make it more difficult to learn some things, either in this particular example, or in general?
(C) If so, are there any natural systems (not notations devised by humans) which are harder to work with for people with more mental talent or training? Idiot savants come to mind.
(D) Is part of the perceived gulf between art and science due to artists developing notations, theories, and conventions that make art more difficult for scientists?
[1] Yes, I know they're not really equal in most historical intonations, blah blah etc.
[2] Yes, I know you musicians think that's easy. That's because you're saying "scale" and "key of B" and constructing a new scale in that key, which is a pretty efficient representation for scales and simple chords, but gets messy for music going beyond that.
[3] Or mapping the pattern being played into some scale or chord or other construct, translating that into the new key, and recreating it in that key. That seems unlikely, or to require forming concepts for most of the 220+495 possible 3 and 4-note "chords", since even with simple church music musicians often can't say what chord is being played. (komponisto has an explanation for that, saying that what is being played is not chords, but temporal sequences moving between chords. But most musicians don't think of harmony that way.)
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 -- ma... (read more)