I’d like to start with the idea that notation can be usefully thought of as a tool. Like all powerful, complex tools, it shapes not only the type of artefact it produces but the maker using it. I’ll look at a few ways in which western musical notation has influenced our musical practice, and some of the attempts to deal with its perceived constraints. I also want to argue that notation is a special type of tool which is shared between two users – the composer and performer – and that acknowledgement of this fact should inform our habits of score-making.

I’m going to draw on ideas about the use of tools as set out by Richard Sennett in The Craftsman, and views on the development of notation from Hugo Cole’s Sounds and Signs: Aspects of Musical Notation.

The development of the notation system as we know it has tended composers to focus on certain musical parameters. Hugo Cole writes:

‘Areas of interest in a musical culture are reflected in its notations. In the West, we have developed exact time-pitch specifications, but in other respects have never attained the subtlety or degree of detail shown in notations of certain types of Eastern music. Where our traditional notation has just one way of indicating the rising interval of a second, the Byzantine cantillation system has six, each sign corresponding to a different way of passing from note to note. Chinese lute tablatures have six ways of denoting pizzicato and twenty-six varieties of vibrato’

‘Our notation could never serve for a music in which interest centred on mode of attack, or in which the expressive force lay in the way in which each note was joined to the next, or in which a mechanically divided scale was used (as, for example, the scale of Turkish zither music, where the intervals are defined as the twenty equal divisions of the finger-board).’

‘The structure of our own conventional notation system has … encouraged us to think of music exclusively in terms of pitch and time relationships and by discouraging us from notation microtones or irregular rhythms’.

And from this we might be able to see how the tool of composition – notation – can mould to a large degree not only the typical piece enabled by it, but the nature of the musicians who use it. Richard Rastall, in his account of the history of western notation, argues that ‘The way we notate music, then, has tonal, or at least harmonic, implications’, and suggests that this is due in large part to ‘sight-reading habits’:

‘A keyboard-player prefers a chord to be written tonally because he can assimilate it more easily, and his fingers have been trained to accommodate arpeggios and other chords in various keys … in vocal music the difficulties are greater unless the singer has perfect pitch. For example, a doubly-augmented fourth or a diminished sixth are much harder to sing than their enharmonic equivalents, both perfect fifths.’

The are too many factors in the development of western notation to go into in this brief time. Many seem fortuitous or arbitrary. And in any case, many are obscure to us now, but it’s worth focussing on one, particularly concrete, area to explain the biases of our notation system.

The origins of copyright law can be traced to the invention of the printing press and had a profound effect on the development of notated music. For the first time, a musical work had value as a commodity, but only certain aspects of it – and it was only the aspects of a score which were conducive to printing – pitch, rhythm, structure – which could be copyrighted. Jacques Attali, in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, writes:

‘the author only had control over written reproductions; this is an indication of how little weight was given to performances. The space of communication was strictly limited to printed characters. Outside the written reproduction, valueless.’

It is not a leap to suggest that the privilege accorded to the 12 pitches of the conventional stave and regular rhythms in western music was due in part to the dominance of printing and copyright law.

So, tools shape the user; and it was this basic truth about notation that led many in the middle of last century to attack conventional notation, and envisage new methods. John Cage put it simply in ‘Silence’ from 1961:

‘The present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer, who will be faced with the entire field of sound.’

This was a comment on composition and notation – but clearly, he was consistently preoccupied with the institution of notation, and, with many others, explored new methods – as seen in his 1969 book, Notations. Graphic scores (which derive from Cage’s experiments), as well as highly complex or otherwise novel notational techniques, address the same basic concerns with the constraints of the conventional system.

I want to step sideways for a moment and return to the notion of notation as a tool. Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman, is, among other things, a study of the ways in which people get to grips (usually literally) with tools, a description of how manual skills develop, and an argument about good craft practice. He argues that craft develops slowly, with repetitive use of a particular tool or action, followed by reflection on that use. He has a notion of ’embedded, tacit knowledge’ – which is knowledge that the user is so familiar with using it has become instinctive. Embedded knowledge is essential in the accomplishment of high-quality craft. He writes:

‘In the higher stages of skill, there is a constant interplay between tacit knowledge and self-conscious awareness, the tacit knowledge serving as an anchor, the explicit awareness serving as critique and corrective.’

To anyone who has learned a musical instrument, this observation, along with the acknowledgement of painstaking, repetitive practice in developing fluent performance, will come across as intuitively correct. They also suggest to me the need for a basic level of caution in notation – if a nuanced, vibrant performance is the goal.

The problem I have with radically novel notational techniques, including graphic scores, as a means of creating high-quality music, is that they do not engage with a performer’s highly developed tacit knowledge, and so subtle, instinctive levels of finesse are unattainable. Hugo Cole reflects on this when he writes about attempts to reform the notation system:

‘Habitual patterns of response, slowly established and reinforced by use, and in which an unconscious reflex element is involved, cannot be instantaneously modified by the issuing of fresh directives. Though we can (on paper) extend the area of control or allow new freedom into the score, we cannot impose the attitudes needed, if the new directives are to be effectively carried out.’

Similarly, highly complex scores risk preoccupying the performer with conscious processes; the preliminary lengthy explanations of layout and symbols, highly detailed note-by-note directions and multiple extensions of conventional technique all detract from the performer’s subliminal craft, which, it seems to me, is vital in producing a performance of spontaneity and subtlety.

The development of wildly over-determined scores seen in the last few decades is symptomatic of a lopsided attitude to the composer-performer relationship. The Swiss composer Arthur Honegger once said,

‘Do you not find it odious that a creative musician should be obliged to pass through the filter of another musician who plays his works? In painting would a picture restorer allow himself to retouch the work?’

which seems to me to mistake the blueprint for the building, but is nonetheless an excellent example of the trend in modern compositional practice, which views performance as a hassle, an annoying human-error-prone hurdle which obstructs the reception of the pristine artefact, the score.

Any argument for the use of economic notation, for the sake of good performance practice, will raise the objection that such an idea is a repressive restraint on the creativity of the composer. This would be a good moment to return to my earlier statement that notation is a tool shared by composer and performer. I’d like to suggest that composer and performer be seen as coterminous craftsmen, occupying the same space in a single process to a single end. If seen in this way, it’s possible to judge any notational practices as an idea about the relationship between these two halves of the music-making process.

Pragmatic, explicable scores which make use of basically conventional notation, allow a performer’s powerful subconscious expressive capacities a chance to surface. Sennett would call this a special instance of his concept of ‘applying minimum force’, an key concept in any type of good craftsmanship; applied to composition, it would mean restraining the impulse to dictate to the performer down to the last detail, making only the most vital notations and allowing room for ambiguity.

The challenge for composers who still wish to work with live instrumentalists (electronic music, or any music where the composer also executes the score, is not my concern here) is to find a way to develop a distinctive musical voice that nonetheless makes space for the spontaneous genius of the performer. And it’s my hunch that consistent, careful use of conventional, pared-back notation is a sure method of achieving that.