Note: This is the first part of a translation of two articles I’ve written for the german magazine/anthology Testcard, which will hopefully appear this spring; one about the history of recording and music media, the other about the development of notions of intellectual property in relationship to the development of certain technologies. So don’t wonder when you don’t find anything about copyright in this post and notation is the only technology mentioned. This is just the start. I go back to “the beginning of it all” because it helps making sense of the things that came after it.

The history of music media in europe starts with the invention of notation. Originally only used in christian religious music, notation made it possible to fixate and store music independently from a person making or knowing that music. Notation, in the beginning being especially coarse concerning rhythm and developed as an aid to better remember things allready learned, grew into a complex system of symbols capable of defining in detail most elements of the then practices of ecclesial music performance. More precise: Notation makes it possible to define the exact pitch of a note in relation to a certain organization of pitches (modes, scales etc.) as well as its relative length. Symbols to mark emphasis, loudness, tempo and several other aspects were added. Before music had been something flexible, each performance being customized to its specific setting, the abilities and preferences of the performer and the audience - now it became possible to define and control if somebody played ‘right’.

This aspect of control, which soon was taken as granted, was a not so unimportant factor for the use of notation in early ecclesial music, because it could be used to outfence elements of secular music which had slipped into ecclesial performance again and again before. This helped to establish a clear distinction between the sound outside and inside of the church, the sacred and the secular.

The impact on music itself went deep: Notation as a spatial/optical representation of music ‘freed’ the perception of music from the perception of time. Before, you could only listen to one moment of music at a time - music depends on the progression of its elements in time as much as no other art form does. But now you could ‘oversee’ a whole piece at once, and go back and forth at will.This fact is mirrored by the course of development of european ecclesial music from unisono singing to polyphony, with its weight on pitch relationships marked through numbers, as well as by the emerging separation of composer and musician, and shapes european art music until this day:

„If the advent of complex, multi-voiced music organized through notational art can be regarded as a critical step in the creation of the role of the composer in Western music, it can also be described as the first step toward the devaluation of the performer as well. […] Indeed, from the standpoint of contemporary musicology, theory, and analysis, the score defines what is, and is not, significant in Western art music.“[1]

How much this process has switched control from the musician to the composer is evident when one considers a classical orchestra: the individual musicians task is to subordinate himself smoothly to a musical project, which is controlled by the conductor. The conductor’s task consists mostly of coordinating the musicians according to a score written by a (often already dead) composer, and the audience has to adjust itself to the performance, not vice versa.

The tendency towards ever more precise notation (culminating in the notation of the microintervalls of modern art music) and ever bigger orchestras demanded ever more disciplin regarding their technique from the musicians. With it came the craze for ‘virtuosity’ we see in the 19. Century.

1 Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine – Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover 1997, S.179f