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From: nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (Doug Alan)
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: Re: Musical Notation
Message-ID: <4712@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Jul-85 07:58:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.4712
Posted: Wed Jul 17 07:58:35 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Jul-85 07:15:29 EDT
References: <3021@decwrl.UUCP> <4623@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 72
Keywords: Kate Bush, jazz, many other musical artists

> From: tynor@gitpyr.UUCP (Steve Tynor)

> Doug Alan has repeatedly made the claim that ordinary musical notation is
> extremely limiting and that Kate Bush has eschewed it for that reason.

I did say that musical notation is extrememly limiting (though I should
probably have said "limited"), but I never said Kate Bush eschews it for
that reason.  She probably doesn't use it all because she never took
piano lessons -- she is entirely self-taught.

I don't want people to think that I think musical notation is useless.
It can be successfully used to describe some aspects of some music (and
that is a useful thing) -- it just is not sufficient to completely (or
in many cases even remotely) encode all of the information needed to
recreate a performance of many pieces of music.

This is true for lots and lots of music.  Not just Kate Bush.  Much of
the music of Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, The Residents, The Beatles, etc.,
etc., etc. cannot be described suffiently using musical notation.  Some
aspects of the music, maybe, but certainly not all of it, and perhaps
not the most important aspects.

Jazz musicians have realized for a long time that conventional notation
can't completely describe much of their music.  They have a special
notation for "blues notes".  When one of these notes is played, the
player isn't supposed to play that note in tune.  But the notation
doesn't specify, how much out-of-tune it is to be played.  Thus every
single performance can have a completely different feel to it, and thus
each performance can be in effect a different composition.

> Though Kate's music is out of the ordinary, I don't hear anything that could
> not be written in standard notation.

Come on!  How are you going to describe bizarre timbres, feedback,
distortion, vocal inflections, breathing sounds, studio effects,
microtonality, machine noises, animal and jungle sounds, guitar solos
(ever notice how sheet music that you buy always says nothing but
"guitar solo" at the guitar solo part, and doesn't give you the music
for it?), screams, helicopters, etc.?

> In fact, from the reviews I've read about her work, I've gathered that
> much of her music *is* scored traditionally (ie. string accomp).

The only time Kate Bush uses musical notation is when a (classically
trained) musician is hired who wants the music written down rather than
sung or played on a piano for them.  And even then, she doesn't look for
how closely they can reproduce what was written down, but for how they
can introduce interesting imperfections that make the music more
emotional.  I suspect that she makes them play parts over and over
again, until she gets something that is perfectly imperfect.

> From what I know about the Fairlight CMI, it's sequencer uses
> conventional notation.

I hear no evidence of sequencer usage (except for rhythm tracks perhaps)
in any of Kate's music, and even if there were, I'm absolutely sure she
wouldn't enter the music via notation, but by playing it.

> So why the claim that Kate Bush has gone beyond traditional notation?

Because she doesn't need it, she doesn't use it, and because there is
absolutely no way the album "The Dreaming" could be described using
musical notation such that aything remotely like it could be recreated
from it without already knowing what the album was like.

Again, all this describes many musical artists -- not just Kate Bush.

				"Over the quavers
				 Drunk in the bars"

				 Doug Alan
				  nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (or ARPA)