These past few days I’ve been re-visiting Harmonia Mundi’s fine “Century” series of compilation recordings. Each volume in the series is devoted to a particular era in music history, starting with the music of the ancient world and ending twenty volumes later with today’s music. Each volume is a masterpiece of packaging and presentation, beautifully documented and illustrated, neatly avoiding academic stuffiness or that unpleasantness that Oscar Hammerstein II used to call “research poison.”
As I have marched through the volumes, I’ve been struck by the fragmentary and incomplete nature of our historical record. So much has been lost! So much left remaining requires a lot of educated guesswork. We have built a past for Western music that is one part documents, one part research, and one part pure imagination.
Our situation is significantly less stable than many other arts. Paintings and statues are physical objects, and as long as they have avoided burning or pulverizing, we have them pretty much intact—albeit with some reservations such as the paint having faded off statuary from the ancient world. Literature, where it has survived, has at least survived much as it would have been experienced in its own time—i.e., via reading.
But until the past century, the history of music has been the history of notated music. And we all know how inexact notation is.
To illustrate just how slippery the transmission has been, consider the following scenario:
Some idiot in the Pentagon pushes The Button. Our bombs go off; everybody else’s bombs go off. A few hours the Earth has become a glowing radioactive environment, all life having been utterly wiped out. (Maybe some spongy things near undersea volcanic vents manage to survive, and maybe a few cockroaches, but that’s it.) Silence falls for eons. Then one fine day a group of flying saucers descend on the still-sterile Earth. An expedition of explorers has arrived from the planet Xgghsgli#$@; they are all cultural anthropologists and archeologists, drawn to the Earth when a few wisps of TV broadcasts from our long-gone civilization reach their corner of the galaxy.
They set to work, digging and sifting away. Sooner or later they find a charred fragment of musical manuscript, containing about 12 bars of the printed edition of Louis Armstrong’s “Heebie Jeebies.” Now, they don’t recognize it as notated music, of course—how could they? (If you’ve read that great sci-fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, you’ll remember that under similar circumstances a printed circuit diagram becomes an object of holy reverence, subjected to an almost endless series of illuminated manuscript enhancements.)
But across the globe, another group has dug up a tattered copy of Reading Music for Dummies. Because these are magnificently intelligent, powerful and insightful aliens from another world, they put two and two together and manage to decipher those 12 bars of “Heebie Jeebies.” They get together in the communal hall and proudly perform the first Earthling music to be heard since that far-off day when the mushrooms sprouted.
Now, a question: how close to you think they would come to Armstrong and his Hot Five’s performance of “Heebie Jeebies”?
If you think they’d get anywhere near, you’re incorrect, wrong, mistaken, and just plain deluded. Just about everything that’s cool about “Heebie Jeebies” is absent from the notated music. Armstrong’s trumpet style, developed first in New Orleans’ Storyville district, then in Chicago with Joe Oliver’s band, has little to do with notated pitches and everything to do with his rhythmic verve, his quick pitch bends, his bounce and élan. The pop of the piano chords, the trombone baps and thrusts—none of this can be notated. The swingy, dancy mood can’t be notated.
And if it isn’t there on the paper, there’s no way our alien musicologists can logic it through, because there was nothing whatsoever logical about it. Early jazz sounded the way it did because it sounded the way it did, period.
Therefore the only correct answer is: they’d miss it by a zillion miles.
As Exhibit A, allow me to offer a hypothetical version of our alien-musicologist performance. I’m playing from the notation given in Gene H. Anderson’s “The Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong”. It seems to me that they’d have no idea what a trumpet or a piano or a trombone was, so I’m employing several digitized instruments that sound appropriately inappropriate.
As Exhibit B, here’s the real “Heebie Jeebies”, as recorded by Armstrong & Co. at Chicago’s Okeh Records in 1926.
‘Nuff said.
Consider that this is more or less where we stand in terms of great swathes of Western music. We don’t really know how it sounded. When we perform Gregorian Chant in the officially-sanctioned style of the monks of Solemnes, we’re making an educated guess as to the performances practices of pre-Carolingian monks. For all we knew, they sounded more Middle Eastern about it all, more bendy and fluid, employing underlying drones or even instrumental accompaniment. On the first volume of the “Century” series, the performers provide intriguing renditions of some Ancient Greek music—but who knows? They can reconstruct the aulos and the kithara, but what were the performance practices? Greek musical notation is less communicative even than Gregorian; probably 99% of the real music is missing in those unenlightening lines of capital letters.
Even as we move closer to the modern age, the lack of actual audio documentation remains a problem. Consider the way the performance of Baroque music has changed during the past 50 years. (I’ve addressed the question of whether “Historically-Informed Performance” is really all that historical elsewhere in this journal.) But even with the unmistakable evidence of recorded performances from the past we continue to grow and develop. So the historical record continues to fluctuate, shift, and evolve.
I suppose that for the bean-counters who are bound and determined to pin everything down this state of affairs is damn frustrating. But I find it exhilarating, even inspiring. History as a living, breathing thing, always in flux and never allowing itself to be captured by anything other than a momentary flickering cross-section. Much of it will remain forever a mystery—i.e., a question that doesn’t require an answer. How wonderful!