Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the best ways to rehearse.  I’m fortunate to be playing with a group of musicians whose technical skills are far superior to mine – so when I enter a situation, if I can adequately describe what I want to happen musically, this group of people can make it happen.  But that’s the hitch.  It’s one thing to have a clear picture in your head of how something sounds – it’s quite another to be able to accurately convey that to a group of musicians.  Enter scoring.

Scoring exists to standardize music in a format other people can use.  Non-ancient systems of scoring arose around the 9th century, when monks noticed their fellow brethren having difficulty remembering the melodies of Gregorian chants.  At that point, scoring consisted of notations above the lyrics that sketched out melodic motion or phrasing.  The system allowed for a good deal of complexity, but because it couldn’t express pitch or time, in the end it acted merely as a reminder for people who already knew the tune.  A quantum leap was made in the 10th century when Guido d’Arezzo, an Italian Benedictine monk, introduced the concept of a four line staff,  the precursor to the modern five line stave we use today.

But the staff notation commonly used today isn’t without its drawbacks.  The system is rigid and leaves little room for creative interpretation.  Also, while there are standardized mechanisms for representing pitch and rhythm, there is nothing for tonality.  For a system of music notation to be truly useful (at least to me), it has to both accurately represent the things that can be accurately represented (like note duration and tempo), while at the same time leaving space for the things that are a little harder to define (like tone and structured improvisation).

That’s what we’re going to talk about this week.  First we’re going to look at how other people have used systems of graphic notation, and then I’m going to share some of my past experiments.  Finally, I’ll suggest a theory with an example for the Jamboree project.

Tune in tomorrow.