In the previous parts of our little story of musical notation we have mainly been focusing on note pitches. But what about the evolution of rhythmic notation?

In the second part of the little story of musical notation, we have seen appear neumes and have discovered that musical notation at this time corresponded more to an aide-mémoire than to a vector of propagation. In the XIth century, a new fact has considerably enrich musical writing: in order to make their work easier, some scribes used to first draw a light line on their support: it was the beginnings of the staff.

Some of you asked me following my article on memory and piano performance what are my tips for improving memory at the piano. This is what I am going to share with you today. How to optimize memorization of works? How do I do learn by heart scores I play?

During the first episode of this little story of musical notation, we were mainly focused on Greeks. Following this tradition, the western medieval musical notation was first alphabetic. Octaves were labeled in uppercase and lowercase letters: The uppercase letter (A) indicated the first octave, the lowercase letter (a) the second one, the doubled lowercase letter [...]

For several thousand years, music was mostly handed down verbally without leaving a written trace. Regardless, since the origin of writing, it is possible to find some localized attempts of musical notations. A Babylonian tablet dated from the 16th century BC attests these attempts and lets us see a musical notation based on writing (alphabetic letters and grammatical accents).

Often I see my collegues being surprised when we pronounce certain words or names. Adorno, Badiou, Deleuze, names that should not appear in the middle of a musical discussion. However philosophy has its role in music, and has strongly influenced History of musical creation.

Closely related to radio first studios at the beginning of the Fifties and to an emblematic figure of the electronic music Pierre Schaeffer, this music is too often forgotten as a major influence in the history of the music by introducing electronics into the contemporary classical music.

This is a dangerous topic. I don’t intend to discus generaly about musical training and teaching but I’ll focus on the particular case of contemporary music, because it takes less place in the education than it deserves, when it’s not completely “forgotten”.

The spectral music is a movement which was born at the beginning of the 1970′s with the research of Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail. It is an aesthetic school from which, following work of their elders, several composers of the next intermediate generation draw their inspiration: Philippe Hurel, Philippe Leroux, Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Jean-Luc Herve, Thierry Went, Fabien Lévy or Thierry Blondeau in France; Kaija Saariaho or Magnus Lindberg in Finland; George Benjamin or Julian Anderson in the United Kingdom, to quote only some of them.