Capturing Music: The story of Notation, originated in a challenge from my wife, Peggy. She pointed out that I had written books for general audiences (First Nights, Yale 2000; First Nights at the Opera, Yale 2004; Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2011), but that as a scholar of medieval music I had never written for broad audiences on a subject squarely in my field.
“Why don’t you write a book you actually know something about?” was one way of putting it.
And Capturing Music (W. W. Norton, 2014) is that book. It is dedicated, naturally, and lovingly, to Peggy.
The book is intended to display the amazing technical prowess of medieval singers who devised means of recording sound. Like writing, which in a way is a recording of sound, musical notation is a means of making marks today to allow one, tomorrow, to reproduce what cannot be seen and really can exist only in the moment. It was an enormous conceptual leap.
Capturing Music is meant to give pleasure; it has beautiful full-page photographs of splendid medieval manuscripts, and it has a recording that sings those pages to you. Recorded by the Blue Heron Renaissance choir of Boston, it allows the look of the page to be translated into sound.
My hope has been to align myself with the recent vogue for books about the acquisition of technology in the past. Dava Sobel’s Longitude told the fascinating story of how to figure out how far you are around the earth; Ross King’s Brunelleschi’s Dome recounted the solution to an architectural challenge.
We feel a vicarious pleasure at seeing people solve apparently intractable problems. How to record sound is one of those problems, and Capturing Music is about the various choices, improvements, and alteration in the system of musical recording employed in the West.
Our own musical notation derives from those earlier versions. The fact that we use the syllables Do, Re Mi, for notes, comes from an 11th-century Italian monk. The reason the black keys on the piano are irregularly spaced comes from the medieval system of writing notes.
It’s about people, not just about notes. Saint Augustine, Saint Gregory the Great, that 11th-century monk (his name was Guido), the cantors of medieval Notre Dame in Paris, Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, and plenty of other characters make it clear that art and technology go along together; technology enables experimentation, and experimentation requires new technology.
Capturing Music does not propose to teach you how to read medieval music, nor does it assume that you can read music now. There are ways to learn to be a good reader of medieval music, and ways to learn to read modern musical notation-but that’s not the main point of this book.
In fact, if it’s of interest, you might pick up enough information to be a pretty good observer of medieval musical notation. It’s not really difficult, and it’s very interesting indeed to be directly connected with the physical act of recording contemporary sounds from long ago. With the manuscript pages and recordings that accompany the book, you might actually come to feel quite comfortable with the look and feel of medieval music and how it is written.
So Capturing Music is not a technical manual. Instead it seeks to do two other things. First, it points out the conceptual ideas behind the various technological discoveries and advances that allowed our system of music writing to evolve. Not all the many technical details, but just the simple and not-so-simple ideas that led to the creation and development of this marvelous technology-a technology that allows us to hear thousand-year-old music.
(Some of the details are mentioned for those who like to pursue techniques, but those parts are carefully boxed off so that you can skip them if you’re not interested in the mechanics of the system.)
And second, the book situates this technology, and the music it encodes, in its cultural, artistic, and intellectual context. Music is of its time, and so are musicians. Writing and sound are interdependent: nobody invents a writing system and then figures out what to write. The encoding corresponds to the message, and each new advance wonderfully matches some changing attitude, style, or need.
The people who developed this technology also prayed, sang, studied, read, and wrote. They travelled, they danced, they married (well, not many of the ones you’ll meet…), they got sick, they grew old, they lived in a world that is not our world but that was very real. To the extent that we can decode the music they wrote we can hear the music they heard, and we can transport ourselves to a world that teaches us much about them, and even more about ourselves.
My own experience of holding in my hands a thousand-year-old book and singing is something that Capturing Music seeks to share. The music is beautiful, and we are in physical contact, almost, with fellow humans from long ago.
Capturing Music by Thomas Forrest Kelly is published by W. W. Norton.
