Indeed, these signs do not appear in the neumatic notation (I might say almost not: some neumes contain them) and we have to wait until the 12th century and the Notre-Dame School before polyphonists precised the length of notes in ternary melismas. Here begins the notation said mensural. The length of the note is not set but determined by the context: 1 or 2 beats for short ones and 2 or 3 beats for long ones.

This method becomes standard and gets broader in the 13th century: form and layout specify new lengths. New types of notes are invented: squares, rounds, filled or hollowed as well as new queues (with a hook for example).

In the beginning of the 14th century, the rhythmic notation became highly elaborated (use of different colors, of signs such as circles or points) and reached a peak at the end of the same century, to finally become progressively simplified. Features from this period are still observable, for example, C and C barre, as well as numeric combinations, which became fractions indicating bars.

In the 17th century a new character appeared: the bar line, and changed everything. A new way of counting was then introduced, not 1-1-1-1 anymore, but 1-2-3-4, and therefore set the duration of notes according to the figuring.

From this time, and despite the many treaties offering an improvement in the rhythmic notation, this one has remained almost unchanged. Thanks to the non-harmonic music, the debate has recently been revived, but the proposed new types are still very experimental.

So, this is the end of our little story of musical notation, but I already promise a post following this exciting saga: I will show you soon some examples of musical notation not exactly like any other!

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Little by little, the use of this line increased, then became ink-drawn and marked with a letter corresponding to the note assigned to this line. This letter is thus the ancester of our modern keys. A bit later, a second line was added, representing the quint, then a third one, in the middle of the two first. People thus realized that each note had its own place on the “staff”. During the XIIth century, the use of a fourth line was spread, later, in the XIIIth century, a fifth one was added.

The use of the “key” fixed all intervals between notes once and for all. Yet, remained the problem of B, which was mobile and was either a half-tone lower than C or a half-tone higher than A. It had thus to be differentiated: B forming a half-tone with C was represented by a square and the other B, by a circle. This was specified, either just after the key (our actual key signature), or in the text (the origin of accidentals).

From the XIIIth century, people started using natural signs (then confused with sharps) and flats for other notes than B: F and C-sharp, and in the XIVth century, G and rarely D-sharp (does not this order remind you something?). At the beginning of the XVIth century E-flat appeared. At the end of this same century was invented chromatism, the flat-natural-sharp system has thus become without limit. It can be said that in the XVIIth century, the classical notation was fixed and won’t be subjected to many changes.

At this stage, musical writing perfectly informs on note pitches and can become a real vector of music propagation. Rhythmic notation evolves the same way, but I will come to this in a next post.

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In order to learn by heart and avoid accidents during a performance, it is necessary to work on various forms of memory. I believe that a pianist, while playing, call upon 4 memories:

An intellectual memory: We know the tonal path, structures…
A kinesthetic memory: By dint of repetition, the fingers find alone their way on the keys.
A visual memory: We have a mental image of the score which takes place. We can visually anticipate the fingers position.
An auditory memory: We hear intervals or chords in advance.

The pianist’s work will thus strengthen each of these memories and teach them to complement each other or replace themselves if need be. I would classify the mechanical memory as the most uncertain, it is very risky to only rely on this one. It is what most of pianists do though…

Let’s now come to my 10 tips for improving your memory at the piano. All are based on my experience, but have proved their worth among many others. They enable to practice the 4 forms of memory and to feel at ease in order to play by heart in concerts.

1. Analyze what you have to play. What is the tonal path? What form has the piece? What specificities do you notice?
2. Be very attentive to the music itself: what is this chord, what interval do I hear here or there?
3. Do not allow doubt to set in. If you doubt, open your score and check through.
4. Do not try to memorize big sections but limit yourself to few bars.
5. There’s no point in repeating 50 times the same thing in order to retain it. You only train your mechanical memory.
6. Play as slow as possible by heart, each hand separately first, then together, while mentally visualizing notes before playing them.
7. Practice away from piano: take time to read the score and to memorize all its informations: phrase, rhythm, dynamics…
8. Inwardly visualize your playing and play your piece mentally, each hand separately, then together.
9. Be able to begin from anywhere: in the middle of a phrase, a bar or a beat.
10. Always finish a practice session by playing your piece very slowly: you will thus correct the mistakes or inaccuracies which have occurred while playing at the tempo.

I hope these advices will be useful for you and will make you feel more at ease during auditions or concerts!

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The first manuscripts in which neumes are written down, date from VIIIth and IXth centuries and come from Aquitaine. Neumes are a set of signs written above the text, indicating the direction of melodic curves and enabling the cantor to remember a melody already memorized.

In a general manner, neumes are graphic elements inspired from accents used by grammarians. The first forms of neumes were said aligned and took the form of grave or acute accents.
The etymological origin of the word “neume” is ambiguous. Indeed, it can signify πνεύμα “pneuma” (breath) as well as νεύμα “neuma”, the sign. One could think that, as a sign, the neume represented the choirmaster’s signs.

Little by little, the number of neumes used increased to reach a total of 8 (Punctum and Virga, Clivis (or Flexa), Podatus (or Pes), Climacus, Scandicus and Salicus, Torculus, Porrectus) to which were added special neumes (Quilisma, Stropha or Strophicus, Pressus, Bivirga, Trigon, Oriscus for example) informing about ornamentation or interpretation. Other conventional signs came to complete this notation, leading to the classic list of neumes. This notation well describes the rhythm and gives coarse indications on the melodic line, but not on the pitch or intervals. The musical notation thus was not a vector of propagation, which remained mainly oral, and was more like an aide-mémoire.

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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).

By the 6th century BC, the Greeks posed the problem of notation a bit further. Alypius, whose introduction to music came to us partly, let us to get a precise idea of what the greek notation was at this time.

The greek system involved two signs for each degree of a given mode: one corresponding to an instrumental notation and another to a vocal notation.

The instrumental notation was composed of sixteen fixed signs, sorted into two octaves. In accord with theory, each sign could take three positions. According to its position, either natural, reversed (seen as in a mirror) or flattened, you had to play the sound either natural, either a half tone, or a quarter tone higher.

The vocal notation was less organized, simply constituted by the 24 letters of the greek alphabet, from alpha to omega. The Greeks, as we do, wrote musical signs above the text and the syllabs gave their length to sounds, thus avoiding use of rhytmical signs. Originally, rhythmic and metric were thus mixed together. Indeed, the vocal music occupied such a place that only the verbal aspect of musical rhythm remained. With the development of instrumental music, the rhythmic emphasized and became a discipline of its own. The greek notation system turns out to be a complex alphabetic system, mainly dealing with sounds height.

See you soon for the next part!

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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.

While musicians are generally not trained in this discipline, aesthetics becomes very important when you deal with contemporary repertoire. Aside from the fact that it represents one of the best tools for understanding and controlling easily “irreducibles” claiming that contemporary music is just noise, it allows us to better understand the way taken by the composer and to resolve some issues of interpretation in a music which does not benefit from historical interpretation and specialists.

The interpreter actually little arises a fundamental question of aesthetics: What is music? Questioning a bit about what the music is helps us to understand views of certain composers. For example, the use of noise in music may seem absurd, but finally does the beauty of music only resides in tonal harmony, in sounds of instruments? Why could the composer use only specific types of sounds and not others? It must be clear that when a composer uses quarter-tones, it is not an eccentricity but an aesthetic way which drove him to the use of so-called quarter tones. Understand why quarter-tones, of course, is interpreting the composer’s music with a faithfull thought.

Of course, the aesthetics can renew “technical composition” or currents, by looking for, for example, the essence of music. If we take an emblematic figure of contemporary music that has a lot theorized as Pierre Boulez, you can easely notice that he had to develop a coherent system to counter to the attacks of older currents.

“The requirements of the current music go hand in hand with some of the mathematical currents or contemporary philosophy,” said Boulez. Of course! Thinking music is a priority especially for its craftsmen. If I go on with quotes from Pierre Boulez I will also use this piece of interview by the Figaro:

“Le Figaro: What do you think about a certain “neotonal” aesthetic which now seems to have the wind in its sails?
P .Boulez : This is a total waste of time. We are celebrating this year the 50th anniversary of the Domaine Musical’s first season: by consulting the works which were played at this time, I found that no major composer of my generation missed. And those I have chosen are still played. The netonal composers, who you refer to, prefer the Institute: it is their place. That does not worry me at all: their power can not exceed the ring road. These are ow-wage earner, unimpressive. Do you think that London or New York are interested in them? Who is invited abroad? It is not them, it’s me. If at least this current gave us masterworks, as neo-classicism of the 20′s, but there is nothing, it’s vacuum. “?

From the side of the composer, the aesthetic will play a key role in his musical process. It is the way of thinking which influences the music he composes, and is used to justify what he writes. Neotonalism against serial writing, Boulez here stigmatises neotonal composers whose aesthetic is diametrically opposed to Boulez. More than a simple parochial quarrel, this debate is crucial for the future of musical creativity, and influences the younger generation of composers.

You understand that musical aesthetics plays a big role on the music stage, mainly in the contemporary world, and I deplore that only musicologists are trained in a discipline which is also necessary for musicians and composers or more generally to all music artists, not just the theorists.

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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.

History of electronic music

The term appears music concrète for the first time in May 1948 in Journal de recherche of Pierre Schaeffer. The legend tells that Pierre Schaeffer would have, due to a broken LP, observed the capacity of to ear to extract from its context a sound. The ear would forget the cause of this one through repetitions and would listen to the soud for itself.

On June 20 of this same year, Schaeffer presents on Radio Paris the first “Concert of Noise”, fruit of his work at the Studio of RTF. This concert is composed of 5 studies:

• Study n° 1 Déconcertante ou étude aux tourniquets
• Study n° 2 Imposée ou étude aux chemins de fer
• Study n° 3 Concertante ou étude pour orchestre
• Study n° 4 Composée ou étude au piano
• Study n° 5 Pathétique ou étude aux casseroles

Due to this first success, the French administration makes possible for Pierre Schaeffer to create his first studio at the RTF. In 1949, he is joined by another personality: Pierre Henry and it is on March 18, 1950 that in the concert hall of Ecole Normale the first concert of concrete music is given with one of the most known works of the duet Henry-Schaeffer: the symphony for a man alone. Indeed, if it had already appeared before, it is only in December 49 that Schaeffer uses officially the term musique concrète, in Polyphonie

The year 1951, sees the appearance of the denomination of the studio in GRMC Groupe of Search for Concrete music but the beginning of the Fifties also marks marketing in France of the first tape recorders with band. The concrete music was recorded before on floppy discs, which coutait very expensive in time and human resources. Indeed, one ?x?cutant by platinum, one which directs platinums and the controlling last platinizes it recording the mixing. The error was not possible, because the engraving of the vynil cannot be corrected, which thus required many repetitions. The magnetic tape will explode the stranglehold of vynil, using a material which composers can edit, but also can be played backwards!

In 1952, Schaeffer publishes the first conclusions of his experiments. The musique concrète resides then for him in the recording of the sounds on a tape and the montage of these “sound objects” in order to create “musical objects”.

The composer are really interested by these development in the Fifties. Messiaen assisted by Pierre Henry composes his Timbres – Durées, Varèse composes in 54 Déserts, the first work mixing accoustic instruments and tape, and in 55, Boulez sign his symphonie mécanique, for Mitry’s movie.

After 3 years, Schaeffer comes back to GRMC in 58, which he turns into GRM Group of Musical Research. Pierre Henry, at the same time, leaves GRM and set up his own studio of music electroacoustic: APSOME.

In 1966, after publication of Theory of the musical objects, Schaeffer leaves the GRM .It is then Fran?ois Bayle who replaces him until 1997, Fran?ois Bayle known for his famous acousmonium. It is in Theory of the musical objects of Schaeffer that appears for the first time the word acousmatic, “music of the invisible sounds” according to Bayle.

In 1968 is set up the Class of electroacoustic composition and musical research in Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and as professors Pierre Schaeffer, then Guy Reibel.

Today in the hands of Daniel Teruggi, the GRM with its acousmathèque created in 1993 lodges more than 5.000 bands including 1.500 works carried out since 1948 by more than 200 composers.

A worldwide impact

If the first attempts of electronic music appears a bit frenchy, it quickly will be propagated to the whole world. In 1953, the first opera of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry is created in Donaueschingen: Orphée 53, first trace of export abroad. Then Maurice Béjart makes the choregraphy of la symphonie pour un homme seul executed by the Ballets de l’Etoile in Paris in 1955 before a world tour.

Abroad at the beginning of the Fifties, studios appear a bit everywhere. The electronic studio of music of the WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) in Cologne will be used by Stockhausen for its work Gesang der Jünglinge in 1956. Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna set up in 51 what, four years later, will become the studio of phonology of RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) in Milan. In Europe, at Stockholm, at Helsinki, at Copenhagen and the B.B.C in London, studios dedicated to electronic music are also set up. In the United States, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening also began in 1951 their research in their center inaugurated in 1959 under the name of Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center (C.P.E.M.C.). And one should not forget, the studio of sonology of Utrecht (created in 1961) and the studio of Stockholm (E.M.S.) which will make research about interfaces for musician in the Seventies.

Some composers and some works

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This is a dangerous topic. I don’t intend to discuss generally 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”.

In conservatoires and universities, If you must study Beethoven’s sonatas, Bach’s fugues, romantic pieces, you’re not forced to play Berio, Stockhausen, Manoury and so on… When exams are coming and a contemporary piece is in the program, students are stressed because they are not used to this music, or simply think that they can do what they want: nobody knows.

However, for us pianists, studying contemporary music is fundamental. It enables to get with anonther view onto piano, and especially to acquire all the possibilities of piano, of which precious little people are aware.

Teaching contemporary music, yes but how? There is the real dilemma. I’am against a special course for contemporary piano, because it would confine in its ghetto this music. But training teachers to sensitize their students, and guiding them in the way to play those pieces. But this big work upstream piano classes is missing. Indeed, rare are opportunities to read a contemporary text during theorical classes, and the piano teacher can’t assume alone piano courses and sensitization to new repertoires.

If we can have some good examples (SBAM in Belgium), sensitizationis always punctual and therefore not so beneficial, and these target only students with a nearly achieved education. The problem requires us to get back to basics of the first years of education. Make listen to the youngest this repertoire, and Stop quarrels between teachers could enable a march. It is completely unacceptable that nowadays some teachers still consider a certain repertoire as unintelligible noise. We mustn’t, as teachers, restrain the field of vision of our student, but widen it, guide and not impose. Today’s music must be a part of studies as well as the others classical musics. It’s up to students to like or not, we don’t have to inluence them or truncate history of music.

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But what is this technique of composition? The spectral music is based on the discovery of the nature of the musical tone and on the composition of the spectrum – entity integrating at the same time the harmony and the tone – of a sound. It is a music which works on the transformation of sound material, thanks to continuous processes and by using microtonal techniques of orchestration which will allow an amalgamated perception (that of the tone finally). Tristan Murail, Gerard Grisey, Hugues Dufourt and Michaël Levinas developed this research, while incorporating techniques derived from the analyze-synthesis by computer, which made possible to return to the details of the representation of the tone. They will apply thus to the writing for traditional instruments, the techniques discovered in electroacoustics such as the compression of spectra, the frequency modulation, the loop of re-injection, or the reverberation. Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s Stimmung, György Ligeti’s Atmospheres, Iannis Xenakis’s Metastasis or Jean-Claude Risset’s Mutations are works which basically influenced the spectral current by their ambiguity between harmony and tone.

On the contrary to other composers, Gerard grisey theorized much on his school which he called liminal (limen: threshold), his analyses remain circumspect and the technical analysis prevails. Nevertheless one could release a leitmotiv which would reach its climax in its positioning towards the composition, composition which he brings closer to the Deleuzian concept of splendor of the pronoun „one“. In Tempus ex machina, he writes: “The composition of process, writes it, leaves the daily gesture and by that even frightens us. It is inhuman, cosmic and causes the fascination of Crowned and Unknown, joining what Gilles Deleuze defines as „Splendeur du On“: a mode of impersonal individuations and singularities pre-individual. ”

The doubt is thus thrown on the identity of the being sound and is accentuated with the following vision of Grisey: “The sound, with its birth, its life and its death, is similar to an alive being”, which consequently raises questions of classical ontology: “From what the sound comes? Where does it go? Which is its way? Which are its junctions? In which direction does it go, here, there? “.

Much more than a closed current and a simple technique of composition, the spectral music is an attitude. An attitude resolutely turned towards the future, without dogma, opened to the world and the sound, which makes possible for the young composers to explore the plurality of the musical expression.

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