Recently I gave a presentation on the ambiguity of turning musical notation into actual sound. I began with an introduction that poses the notion of we Earthlings destroying our civilization via The Bomb, with a few shards of our culture being dug up a bazillion years later by things from another world. What would they make of a scrap of musical notation? Perhaps they would consider it to be a religious icon, or a circuit diagram, or somebody’s shopping list, or whatnot. Certainly they would not think of it as music. My sci-fi scenario continues with those same things from another world discovering a book called “Reading Music for Dummies.” Inconceivably brilliant and technologically advanced as they are, the things from another world figure it out, and put on a performance of that scrap of notation they’ve deciphered.
My choice was a blues number by Sippie Wallace and Louis Armstrong. I gave a hypothetical version of the alien performance, a bare-bones, dully staid performance from a MIDI sequencer right off the printed page. Then I played the 1926 Okeh Records original, improvised on the spot and filled with all the expressive—and unnotated—nuances of 1920s jazz. None of that nuance is anywhere on the printed page, and although the aliens were inconceivably brilliant, they did not have second sight. There was no way they could ever get anywhere near to the Wallace/Armstrong original. All their best efforts would get them only the faintest whisper of what was a vital and improvisatory art.
Then I began a sweep of Western musical history, going back to the surviving snippets and shards of ancient Greek music. The notational system, such as it was, served mostly as a reminder to folks who already knew the music. Like the jazz piece, the notation didn’t preserve anything in the way of performance practice, styles, idioms, and all that. As I pointed out to my audience, we’re just like those things from another world when it comes to figuring out Greek music; we can get the pitches and the underlying theory, and we can make copies of extant musical instruments. But we can’t get the style of the thing, all those umpty-million things that they took for granted and never wrote down. Any performance is mostly guesswork.
I proceed to play several recordings of Greek music. Each of them is remarkably different from the other, but more to the point, each has a certain exotic quality about it. In one number, a female singer tosses in a little whoop sound at the end of the lines, like a question mark run wild; in another, two dueling aulos players try to outdo the other in oddly askew rhythms. It all sounds very otherworldly and, most importantly, different.
Which is the crux of the issue. A buyer of a recording of ancient Greek music is likely to be looking for something off the beaten path, something different. Otherwise he or she might just go for the Beethoven quartets CD instead. But imagine that buyer’s disappointment should that brand-new CD of ancient Greek music come off sounding like a collection of humdrum tunes sung by two guys from Cincinnati. What a letdown.
Given that we haven’t a clue as to the real sound of that ancient Greek music, apart from the instruments themselves and the pitches, we can do more or less anything we want with it—whoops, weeps, warbles, wiggles, wails, whinnies. One might be tempted to massage the surviving tunes into good old common time and give them a straight-up note-for-note performance. Sound like two guys from Cincinnati, in other words. But that won’t sell. Nope: far better to throw in weeps and warbles, funny drum beats, some tambourine-ish stuff in cross-rhythms to the tune. Make it sound kinda weird, kinda exotic. Make it different.
Would ancient Greek musicians recognize it? Very unlikely. All in all, they’d probably prefer it to sound like two guys from Corinth instead.