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Looks Like it
Sounds--
or, those bizarre squiggles we call music.
(part four)
Why do we
write music the way we do and is it actually the
best method? Dare we ask?
part one
/
part two
/
part
three
Harmony was something philosophers
liked to refer to long before there actually was any--in
music. It existed as a concept for many eons before
music began to feature it. It thus became the last of
what we consider basic elements of music to develop.
Before that, it was just rhetoric, like peace on earth.
At least, when musicians began to use
it, they already had a name for it.
One of the reasons for this
single-note-at-a-time approach to music for so many
centuries is that it requires a bit of coordination to
make two or more notes sound together and sound like
they ought to be that way. In fact, it wasn't until
music became a written thing that harmony began to
flourish.
(If by 'flourish' we mean every couple
of centuries somebody would add another simultaneous
event to the mix, lots of conservative voices would
protest, and music would lay low for a while to let all
the controversy die down. Once people got sort of used
to it, they could safely assume it to be the divine
order of things, and then the next crackpot musical
innovator would try something else and upset the apple
cart again.)
Something that is curious about that
system of lines and blobs that Guido developed is that
it is really quite adept at adjusting to the need for
simultaneous pitches. It wasn't designed for that, and
for a while, even when different voices sang together,
they tended to get their own staves, which meant that
each note got its own quarters, and nothing changed.
During the Renaissance (1400-1600) musicians often sang
together from enormous part books with the various parts
facing different directions so everyone could gather
around and sing. Otherwise there was little physical
evidence that the lines were part of the same
composition.
Combining staves wasn't necessarily the
problem--put several on a page, one below the other, and
draw a line on the left to join them together. But that
would require that composers think in terms of the
simultaneous combinations of sounds, and that,
apparently, required just as much of a mental revolution
as getting used to the idea that the earth didn't hold
still after all. Until then, composition manuals
instructed the would-be scribbler to write pleasing
parts individually, without worrying about the vertical
alignment of the notes. If the result sounded
aesthetically pleasing, all the better, but it wasn't
through trying!
It wasn't until keyboard instruments
got into the mix that it became necessary to place
multiple notes on one staff. Most other instruments
can't play more than a note at time, and several don't
want to! But a keyboard instrument is perfect for a guy
with 10 fingers that like to exult in their
individuality. The problem, of course, is fitting all
those notes somewhere. At first, this would have been
easy, since the only acceptable harmonies were fifths
and fourths, notes which are reasonably far apart.
But a few centuries later (don't rush
us!) triads came into view. On a keyboard, these
conglomerations of sound appear to be every other
(white) note. And on the staff, it can be represented by
putting the notes in the consecutive spaces, or on the
adjacent lines.
Fortunately Guido left room for this
innovation by deciding that notes should go on lines and
in the spaces between them, so that an ascending scale
alternated between notes with lines through the middle
(musical shiskabob!) and those bounded by them.
[Actually, it occurs to me since I wrote that line that,
had Guido decided to only put notes on lines, we would
have the opposite problem--that of a three-note chord
taking the entire span of a modern staff. However,
half-step conglomerations would be easy to
represent--put them in the spaces. In which case we
wouldn't need accidentals!]
However, you can always get a modern
composer to muck it up. As forward thinking as this
accident was, it only lasted about a thousand or so
years. In the nineteenth century, harmonies, however
complicated, mainly stuck to chains of thirds--notes
still two notes up or down from their neighbor. But by
the twentieth, composers began trying things a little
spicier. Now, trying to place a note on a space and the
one on the line immediately below it means that there is
not enough room for the circles without them mashing
into one another. This problem was solved by placing the
note-heads on opposite sides of the note-stems, like so:
Some composers decided they liked the
mashed-ness pretty well, and the tone-cluster was born,
in which every possible note that can be played should
be within the span of a certain area. Usually this is
done with the flat of the hand, or in the case of a
large cluster, the forearm, or, in the case of one piece
by American composer Charles Ives, a two by four!
This can be modified, by instructing
the player (usually in written instruction) to play all
the black keys or all the white keys within the range
shown.
That ought to settle things, if you are
being all-inclusive; however, if playing every note in
the vicinity is not your style, producing a very
specific clash may present still more problems. The
closer together the notes are, the harder it is going to
be to accommodate them. Say we want an A and and A-flat
in the same chord. Let's further complicate things by
putting in an F and an F-sharp.
That's what that little
number is for, with the very creative stem. Now where
stems were once simple lines, composers in recent
centuries have found all kinds of things to do with
them. For instance, there is the issue of the double
stem, which goes back before Bach:
The reason for this has to do with its
position as a separate voice in the cacophony. We've
been discussing harmony as if it were a block of sound,
meant vertically, and indeed, all of those sounds that
go together have made written music grow very tall, as
if it were a bunch of skyscrapers in Manhattan.
But as I mentioned above, musical
simultaneity was at first viewed as the product of
happenstance--it was the forward flow through time that
was most important. If a keyboard instrument allows
several parts to be combined on one staff, that doesn't
mean they cannot be thought of as several parts, several
'voices.' Bach was very conscientious about giving the
separate parts separate stems, even if they formed a
chord (and even if it made the music look more
cluttered). If the notes could be drawn with notes going
in separate directions, well and good. If not, the note
was moved over ever so slightly to make sure that it
didn't have to share a stem with another note:
Thus, in a situation where one note
happens to be shared by two voices, it is logical to
give it two stems. And, in music before the middle of
the 18th century, it was rare that note-heads would
share the same stem. This, of course, is one of those
things that is confusing to piano students, and seems to
be taking the long way around. From the point of view of
the 17th century (and earlier), it was necessary to
justify each note as a part of a melodic line; not to do
so, treating it like a mass of sound, rather than as a
harmonious accident, was still a new and contentious
innovation. To us, it no longer seems like any big deal,
anymore than a car is a car and does not need to be
described as a kind of carriage that doesn't need horses
to power it, or a piano no longer goes by its full name
(fortepiano, or 'soft-loud', because it could do both).
It all depends on the place (before or after) from which
you are viewing the musical universe.
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