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This is part of an authorized online posting of Harvey Reid's important book, "The Troubadour Chronicles," published in May 2020. It is available in paperback from this web site or from Amazon.com.
“Can I read notes? Hell, there are no notes to a banjo. You just play it.” Reply made by an old-time banjo picker, interviewed around 1850, when asked if he could read music. [From Pete Seeger’s “How to Play the 5-String Banjo” book (1962)] Chapter 6: Troubadours, Music and PaperWe don’t know exactly when or how the matters of writing, language and musical notation started impacting the world of troubadour music, but it was a long time ago, and the situation has evolved steadily into several forms of friction, conflict and misunderstanding. I want to hold several things up to the light here, because controversies about “musical literacy” have been swirling around guitar players and troubadours for nearly five hundred years and show no signs of pleasantly resolving themselves. Reading music is one of the benchmarks of measurement that has long been used to proclaim its practitioners to be superior musically to non-readers, and I especially want to address that idea. When I say “reading music,” I am referring to the idea of using clefs, staff lines, and the various quarter notes, rests and bar lines that the “literate” music world has used for centuries, and not all forms of notation like tablature, lyric sheets or song charts. Even if you’ve never played a musical instrument or done any singing yourself, hopefully you’ll still find this discussion interesting, since it is very much a hot-button concern among music students, teachers and performers and their families. Most of us learn to read printed words in our childhood, and from then on we can simply read things and think no more about it. We generally learn to read language at such a young age that many of us remember little about the learning experience itself, and its value to us is never in question. It is considered to be a basic and necessary activity, and by no means is reading thought of as a specialized skill. A significant percentage of us could read aloud from a book we have never seen before and do a reasonable job of delivering the content to other people, with some expression, probably much better than a robot, at least for a few more years until the robots improve significantly. It is natural to assume, especially if you are not a musician, that reading music works in a similar way. It would make sense at a glance that children should learn it, and that musical illiteracy might be as crippling to a musician as being unable to read words would be to anyone. To a church organist, this might be true, but in the musical world of guitars and troubadours it’s actually very different, and almost a non-issue. The piano player in our church is reading music every Sunday, and like her fellow church pianists, she can reliably provide useful music for services without having either memorized the music or created anything, though I don’t know for sure how many times she has performed any given piece I hear her play, or how much she fills in with small improvisations or omissions. That type of musician usually rehearses and does some homework before a performance, and is reluctant to perform music they have never seen before. The world of reading music revolves around music that is designed to be readable, and it often draws its power from the combining of the voices of the many, and not from the idea that the individual players are being virtuosic. Professional horn players are expected to be able to read scores from the printed page, as are classical string players, though soloists memorize their music and are generally not sight-reading when they perform an opera aria or a featured solo with a symphony. The task of reading music clearly favors situations where written parts involve only one note sounding at a time, especially on wind instruments, though bowed instruments can play two simultaneous notes on adjacent strings. Keyboard, string and many bass players typically can read their parts admirably, as can every instrument in the orchestra or marching band, as long as the difficulty lies within what is considered a normal range. This situation casts a disparaging shadow on guitarists who can’t or don’t read, and who have never worked with a conductor in their lives. It is this shadow I am concerned with here– the recurring specter of the idea that you are not a “real musician” unless you can sight-read well and even play things “cold” from a musical score. Pavarotti didn’t read music. Neither did the Beatles, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Irving Berlin or almost all popular guitar players or singers since World War II. If you want to play some songs recreationally on your guitar, many of us in the troubadour community feel strongly that you should not devote your precious musical time trying to learn to read notation as part of your training, though I might be one of the few who is so bold as to say it loudly. The first problem is that the relationship between written musical notation and stringed instruments with fingerboards involves complications that singers, single-note instruments and keyboards don’t encounter. Secondly, when a musician is singing while also providing their own accompaniment, it further complicates those problems and introduces new ones. Third and fourth, there isn’t much troubadour music written down, and there is no consensus on how to sound the strings. Some players use a “plectrum” or flatpick to either pick or strum single notes or multiple strings, while others use the thumb alone, or in combination with one or more right-hand fingers. No single notation system will work for all of these styles, and some players do more than one at different times. On the piano, the ten fingers either play or don’t play the keys, but guitar strings are brushed, struck and plucked up or down, and even snapped or pulled in all sorts of ways. The diversity of right-hand guitar approaches, especially among “untrained” players, is part of the beauty of the instrument, and in no way should or could be standardized. The diversity of ways people like to sound their strings frustrates attempts to normalize a notation. Finally, the vital dynamic, rhythmic and tonal properties of the unwritten music comprise a huge part of its content. The glissando and other special symbols, the Italian instructions and comments above the musical staff like non troppo mosso, adagio, or briskly but lightly don’t convey enough information to tell a sight-reader how to sound like James Taylor, Ani DiFranco, Arlo Guthrie or some other iconic artist. The ultra-important expressive elements that lie at the heart of the troubadour art form simply cannot be precisely depicted in existing written notation. Music Meets Paper It’s somewhat combative to say this, though I will repeat it often, but the music education world that has always been the primary endorser of the practice of reading musical notation unfortunately does not seem to formally recognize the musical value of the troubadour art form, where someone is playing an instrument and singing at the same time. This begs the difficult question of how much stock to put into the implied superiority of written-music world’s chosen methods of learning or performing, or in their conclusions, whether voiced or privately held, on the value of unwritten music and its alternative methods of transmission. Since music academies don’t really acknowledge the existence of troubadour music or address our concerns in their curriculum, it becomes a struggle to find comfortable common ground on a number of issues, especially on musical notation. This has been an ongoing problem ever since written music began to be widespread, just as there have been problems extracting the story of unwritten music from our mostly written histories. Unwritten Music Scholarly discussions about the “authentic” troubadour music and poetry from the 12th and 13th centuries in France and Italy are almost entirely based on written documents, many of which were themselves written at later times than when the music was actively circulating. There are at least nine vexingly different extant versions of the epic “Song of Roland” from the Middle Ages, for example, all of which appear to have been written down long after the time the poem originated and flourished in the oral tradition in medieval France. So how do you study or learn a poem that doesn’t have a fixed form, that undoubtedly existed in many others, and that was not just a poem but a song originally? Any musicians who improvise do that sort of thing constantly, though some songs or tunes have more fluid forms than others, and some musicians are more inclined to constantly modify their music than others. Many of the songs we troubadours sing work like this– they are not in a fixed form, and the performer recalls, shapes and modifies the delivery in the moment, even if they are not necessarily folk songs or improvisations. One of the ongoing myths about music says that “jazz musicians” are the ones who improvise, yet many musicians of all styles also occupy the moment and make endless modifications to the music as they play it. Woody Guthrie himself was a marvelous example of a singer who constantly added or changed words, extended or compressed phrases or added dynamic emphasis seemingly arbitrarily, adding a whole new dimension of variability and spontaneity to a song during its performance. The stories of his dancer wife Marjorie trying to get him to play guitar consistently along with one of her performance pieces with the Martha Graham troupe are amusing, because Woody was hopeless. Blues performance has always been filled with performers modifying songs and adding or skipping beats or verses seemingly arbitrarily. As soon as you try to write music down, you come up against this strange wall, since you then have to make decisions and choices about these issues. Fiddlers also constantly modify and rephrase their “simple” 16-bar tunes, so that any written version of any tune played by nearly any master fiddler immediately becomes incomplete and inaccurate, and this inherent “fuzziness” becomes concealed from any reader, even though it is actually one of the most delightful and personal pleasures of knowing and playing those tunes. A recording or a video of a song or a fiddle tune has none of those notational issues. For an example, go listen to guitarist Dan Crary’s nearly 8-minute version of the one-chord fiddle tune “Sally Good’n” as he, fiddler Byron Berline and banjoist John Hickman spin out endless variations that no doubt would be different if they played it again. Even if someone transcribed and published every note of that version it would have questionable value to those musicians or to anyone wanting to learn to become masters of that craft. In the past century, since the sword of unwritten music was pulled out of the stone by recording and broadcasting technologies, orally and aurally-transmitted music has recovered a huge amount of ground that it lost in the preceding five centuries. Writer and music historian Ted Gioia summed things up beautifully in his brilliant book “Delta Blues”: “Blame it on Pythagoras, if you want. Western thinking on music was developed by scientists and philosophers, starting with Pythagoras, and continuing with Ptolemy, Boethius, and others, who sought quantitative explanations for the art of plucking strings…. To this day, the path to musicianship in the West builds from interaction with pieces of paper– written scores, lessons, songs to learn– driven by pedagogical systems, methodologies and arcane disciplines, scales, exercises, and the like. When African traditions entered the stream of American music, they challenged this hierarchy, almost to a scandalous degree…. not just that there were no systems or scores; not just that it was played by the untutored and unlearned; not just that the music wasn’t written down; the real rub here was that the music couldn’t be written down, given the standard tools of Western notation.” This is true not just of blues or spirituals, but of bagpiping, Russian domra playing, bluegrass or Irish fiddle music, and of what most singers and songwriters still do when they sing their songs with their guitars. African-American musicians may have provided the keys that let all the troubadours out of prison, so to speak, and we’ll return to that later. Let’s keep going in this discussion about music, notation and paper. Troubadour Music vs. Paper Nevertheless, written music retains a very strong foothold in the world and in popular consciousness as the “correct” or “educated” way to play or to teach music, and the battle over whether it is the right thing to do to take guitar lessons that involve reading music is unfortunately far from over. Can someone please explain to me again why we troubadours should embrace sight-reading and musical notation? What exactly are people supposed to be reading and playing with those skills they are being urged to work so hard to develop? Exercises in sight-reading instructional books? People by the millions are already learning to play guitar and always have, without any involvement with institutionalized learning or sight-reading of notation, and they would all certainly flunk every entrance exam to music schools. Does this mean they are ignorant and their music has no value or is deeply flawed? Of course not. All musical notation has limitations, especially regarding rhythm and tone, but the biggest issues involving troubadours and written music are that 1) the standard musical notation system evolved with the keyboard, and it is inherently clumsy for the guitar 2) a huge percentage of guitarists play in non-standard tunings, for which sight-reading doesn’t really work 3) Extremely small numbers of guitarists anywhere sight-read music fluently and never have, yet there remains an impression embedded in nearly everyone that reading music with notes on the staff lines is the “correct” way to learn to play music and to become a “well-rounded musician.” I cannot find a spokesperson or an eloquent and thoughtful explanation anywhere of why it makes little sense for troubadours, whose musical statement involves accompanying their songs, to invest their time trying to learn to read music. This is especially true when their goals are primarily recreational, which seems to mean that I must buy a megaphone and create and argue the case here for troubadours ignoring notes, rests and staves and feeling good about it. It has remained a very sensitive issue, and boils down to a choice made in everyone’s first guitar lesson of whether to try to read music or not. A significant percentage of guitar education materials available certainly seem to think that the answer is yes, though a century or two ago that figure may have been vastly higher. A flood of questions present themselves, beginning with whether or not it would even be possible for everyone to agree on what a proper guitar or troubadour written-music education experience should consist of. Should the teachers, the students or perhaps popular performers decide what is a proper learning experience? Maybe it is fine and healthy that so many people are playing music and not sight-reading, and maybe what they are doing is not wrong. Private guitar teachers today are not licensed or supervised in any way, and are free to do whatever they want. You can’t fix plumbing or install drywall most places without a contractor’s license, which often involves passing an exam, but there are no regulations or rules anywhere regarding who can teach what in guitar lessons or music instruction. Teachers who use paper are commonly using various combinations of tablature, chord charts, chord diagrams and even just lyrics with chord symbols above the words. Does someone need to crack the whip and fix this random, disorganized peasant music learning system? Is it time for legislation? I attended a meeting where music educators from Florida were discussing the formalizing of statewide requirements for music education in their schools, and one of the things for 4th graders to be possibly tested on was the meaning and use of the word ostinato. My troubadour blood is still boiling, thinking about how utterly useless and tangential that word is to my musical world. Should sight-reading and its terminology be an integral part of guitar or troubadour learning? Why? Are guitarists fundamentally lazy, incompetent or just rebellious? How much should we be teaching guitarists to play instrumental music that is written on paper, as opposed to creating or improvising song accompaniments, which is what the vast majority of music done with a guitar consists of? How many people do we need who can sight-read guitar music? What are they going to read and who is going to listen to it? Are memorization and improvisation more valuable skills to cultivate? Should we openly tell people not to bother with reading guitar music, or instead encourage them to start when they are very young and their brains are agile? Is it possible that like languages, only really young children can learn to read music fluently? Do the issues apply to sight-reading, memorization, improvisation or all of them? Guitar students usually have to wait until they are about 13 years old so that their hands are large and strong enough; perhaps by then it’s already too late for them to learn to read music and wire their brains directly to their instruments like young piano and violin-playing children supposedly do. I want to move on to other topics, but I’m going into the fray here to try to put this musical notation thing to rest– no pun intended. Music Meets the Printing Press Reconciling Written and Unwritten My wife and I hired a local piano teacher to teach our boys, since neither of us learned piano as a child and we thought they should have the opportunity. He asked what song they wanted to learn, and they said “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. So he sent away for the sheet music, came back in a week and put it on the piano, and proceeded to show them how to read the notes and play the song. They said “That’s not how that song goes!” and lost interest instantly. I still have the sheet music. (Next time I find it I’ll have my sight-reading phone app play it for me.) It makes me wonder who wrote the arrangement, and how much money they or the publisher have made selling it to piano teachers. How would you notate the tone of the opening riff to “Satisfaction” on paper so someone would know what it should sound like? It’s not an organ stop, and there is no Italian word or symbol for Maestro FZ-1 Fuzztone you can put above the staff. The sound of that guitar riff changed rock & roll guitar forever, but you can only appreciate or learn it by hearing it. It actually sounds a little silly when you play those three notes on the piano. Untold numbers of people have had unsuccessful sight-reading experiences that arguably should have never happened, and it is unmeasurable how many of them have been led to believe that they are not musical because of those failures. Real damage has possibly been done on a wide scale, especially to people who wanted to play guitar, and were faced with imaginary barriers to music learning and an unnecessary lack of success involving musical notation. It is daunting to contemplate how many fine singers with a good sense of rhythm or other musical instincts and talents have been tossed under the music bus because of written music. I am startled at how many people in my small world seem to have been trampled by beginning music instruction, like dogs that have been kicked or punished when they were young. Plenty of piano students have failed to read music effectively, but because guitarists read music at probably the lowest level of any common instrument, they have especially had to learn to live with an inferiority complex that is connected to the feeling that they are not “real” musicians or must quit because they don’t read music. Because there are no loud voices or respected institutions telling anyone that it is fine and normal to not read guitar music, it takes a strong-willed, thick-skinned person to shrug off all the stigmatization of either rejecting or being unable to sight-read and pursue a career or even a hobby in “illegitimate” music. Even the magazines of folk music periodically publish articles about how important and valuable reading music is, and I am not aware of any high-profile public spokespersons in my lifetime publicly pleading the case of not reading guitar music. We talk openly now about “shaming” as it connects to body image, diet or sexual preference, but I have only heard privately from people about their “music shaming” or “guitar shaming” experiences. Every modern troubadour has to work through this either consciously or unconsciously, and explain to themselves or their families why they don’t or can’t go to school, take lessons or teach themselves to study music “properly.” In many aspects, institutionalized music learning is still operating like it is still the 1700s, though it can seem to be a 21st century activity when they are using computers or taking lessons and reading music from an iPad instead of a piece of parchment. I am convinced that I am not crazy to be suspicious and to be questioning the “authority” and “validity” of sight-reading for guitarists, and that the entire guitar education system in our institutions of learning desperately needs some major überizing. Guitar has been the dominant instrument in society for nearly 75 years, yet that hegemony has had only a very minimal effect on music education. Its players continue to feel like outcasts, and the ways of troubadours remain in the misunderstood realm of folk knowledge. The popular new phenomenon of guitar orchestras is delaying the revolution and tricking students and their parents into thinking they are learning useful guitar skills as the conductor directs dozens of children at their music stands to all play simple melodic parts on their guitars. I’m not advocating for troubadours to be musically ignorant, and admittedly many of them are barely even aware of what key or time signature they are playing in. It is valuable sometimes to read guitar tablature and especially chord charts at gigs or recording sessions. Those charts are important, and you will be far better off if you learn some music theory about keys, chord structure, progressions and transposing. Learning to sight-sing even makes some sense for a troubadour, though there are not a lot of melodies you are going to find that only exist in old books that you have to be able to sight-sing to explore, since there are now audio or video versions of nearly everything available somewhere. Getting a music-reading phone app for $3.99 might make more sense than trying to learn to read the notes. Sight-Reading as a Specialized Memory Skill Skilled sight-readers often become music teachers, and they naturally expect that their students should be able to learn what they learned, by similar methods. There are enough people out there with this ability that the skills can be passed down, though the majority of students fail to perform at the level of their teachers. There always seem to be some but not huge numbers of wire-walkers, fast race horses, redheads or albinos, midgets, bass singers and people who seem to be pre-wired with abilities for specialized skills. Sight-reading of music might be part of that group of special aptitudes that only some of us can excel at. Roughly one out of ten people is left-handed. Can you choose to be left-handed or not to be? Perhaps simultaneous language translators and sight-reading musicians occur at a regular but reduced frequency in humanity. Some very smart people think that we cannot will ourselves or try harder to become one of them if we are not born with some key element of it. Musicians who are innately good at sight-reading would naturally think that whatever learning path worked for them will work for others. Sadly, huge numbers of people who don’t sight-read well have been cast off along the music highway, having been led to believe that they failed or are not musical, when the truth may be simply that they are not and will never be skilled sight-readers. As long as we get enough people to fill the few sight-reading positions in churches, orchestras and schools the system is declared healthy, when in truth it is quite possibly failing the vast majority of people who enter into it, and certainly not reaching out to or encouraging other kinds of musicians to participate in the ways that work best for them. Reading Music, Memorizing and Parts of the Brain... I also don’t get a sense that schools currently encourage memorization as a tool of learning academic skills in general, yet almost all learning ultimately depends on at least some of it. My children were taught in school to understand and conceptualize addition and multiplication, but ultimately what the teachers and test-makers really wanted but never actually said was for children to just memorize the arithmetic tables and to come up with the correct answers quickly. Neurological research seems to indicate that music might work differently in our brains than other cognitive disciplines, and musical learning may be a unique form that isn’t directly analogous to things like math or languages. It is possible that our brains link the words and music of songs together in our memories, which might mean that learning songs with words happens differently from learning just words or just melodies. Rhythm might even be a factor also. It’s anybody’s guess whether we are making a huge error in education by not encouraging children to memorize as much music and poetry as possible when they are young. When Jesus was training as a rabbi, it was considered standard Bet Sefer and Bet Talmud practice for students to memorize the Old Testament by the age of fourteen, because they were certain it would have value for them later in life. Troubadour children could be memorizing huge numbers of useful songs and tunes instead of being taught to read them. The Ongoing Farce of Guitar Instruction Books Who Reads or Should Read Music? Conversely, a huge body of oral-tradition music revolves around another set of sounds, rhythms and skills that are not notated on paper or sight-read. Obviously at a gig where everyone is reading you stand out as being deficient if you don’t. But an orchestra member who is good at sight-reading could not use those skills to play a gig in a blues or country band– there is a different skill set involved for each situation. There are no scores to read at the country or the blues gigs. You couldn’t just look at sheet music for a Cajun fiddle tune and know how to play it in the Cajun style unless you were already familiar with what the style sounds like and how to do it. The violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz’s renditions of jazz and pop standards from his “It Ain’t Necessarily So” album or Itzhak Perlman’s “Turkey in the Straw” or “Bill Cheatham” (on YouTube titled “John Denver and Itzhak Perlman Play Bluegrass”) come to mind as examples where world-renowned masters of more complex and difficult styles were not able to play a purportedly simpler style better or more effectively than supposedly less-skilled or less-trained players. Nor could you program a sight-reading robot to play a waltz in the bluegrass style, or feed it a melody and expect the robot to be able to properly adorn it with appropriate and lovely Scottish fiddle trills and ornaments. Written notation and language on paper can capture words to songs and it can show sequences of notes, chords and harmony. But syncopations, hesitations, nuances, tones, accents, and other key expressive, dynamic and rhythmic elements of styles of music don’t map onto paper very well, and have always lived in an alternate musical universe that first became tangible when sound recording began. Now with the ubiquity of video, it is a signal that non-written music is spreading like never before, which might herald a rapid increase in the irrelevance of written music. The number of people in the country who can sight-read guitar well enough to make a living doing it is statistically zero, unless you count guitar teachers who make money trying to teach people to read music. The number of guitarists sight-reading on commercials, jingles and recordings, or occasional pick-up gigs is probably considerably smaller than the number of professional players on the thirty teams in the National Basketball Association (currently 450, and a very elite group of people), and infinitesimal when compared to the number of people who play guitar. It’s my guess that those few professional guitar readers are also skilled at playing by ear, jamming and improvising, and use those skills on their gigs as much as the reading chops they have. Studio guitar legend Tommy Tedesco wrote colorfully about his experiences playing guitar on thousands of commercial recordings, jingles and hits, and how much he had to invent and improvise even as he sat looking at a written score. The number of well-known and successful troubadours who are playing concerts and making recordings who can or do sight-read guitar music as part of their artistic life is immeasurably small. Guitarists just don’t have or need that skill. The only place you will find any significant concentration of players who can sight-read guitar at all is in music schools where they are training the next generation of sight-readers, whose future job will be to train their successors. There aren’t a lot of careers left where your occupation is to learn a highly refined skill, and then not use it to do anything except teach others to do it, so they can become teachers, passing on the esoteric skills and perpetuating the cycle. Monks training monks to become monks so they can train more monks who will train monks... Guitar Notation: Square Peg, Round Hole? Western musical notation is fundamentally just a graph of pitch against time, where time is the horizontal x axis, and the notes on the staff are displayed vertically, forming the y axis. The notation system co-evolved with the piano keyboard, which is one-dimensional, so that reading piano music is cognitively a 90 degree rotation, where the fingers take the shape and patterns of the notes on the page. The reason so many pianists can read music is that the notation system was designed for the piano, and it apparently dovetails well enough with the human brain, eyes and hands. A two-dimensional piece of paper can show a reasonably good representation of one-dimensional keyboard graphed against time, but it would require some kind of three-dimensional notation to work equivalently for the guitar. The already two-dimensional fingerboard doesn’t map very well to the one-dimensional musical staff, any more than the round Earth maps to a flat piece of paper. It may be that computers or virtual reality will somehow allow us to do something better, but even if it were developed, it is extremely unlikely that it will come to fruition and be adopted into our present system of music education and performance in the foreseeable future. Since there is only one of each note on a piano, the strategies of fingering the notes are significantly more straightforward than on guitar. There are sometimes alternate fingerings for notes on wind instruments, but the fact that there is never more than one note at a time being played greatly reduces the complexity of reading. There are almost always multiple ways of executing a note or a group of notes on the guitar, and it often takes more than a glance at a page to sort out the various fingering choices. There is just one Middle C among the 88 keys on a full-size piano. Depending on how high up on the neck you consider it reasonable to play, 45 musical notes are playable on the guitar I’m holding now. There are actually five locations where I can play a middle C: the 20th fret of the 6th or bass E string, the 15th fret of the 5th string, the 10th fret of the 4th string, the 5th fret of the 3rd string, and the 1st fret of the 2nd string. Not only are they in very different locations, but they also have their own timbres, and if I wanted to add a significant vibrato to the note, I would want to choose either the C on the 3rd or the 4th strings. Only 8 or 9 of the entire range of 45 notes on the guitar appear at a single unique location, on the thickest or the thinnest strings, and about 11 of those 45 notes can be played at as many as four different places. (I give approximate numbers because it is not standardized how long the guitar fingerboard is. Some guitars give better access to very high fingerboard positions than others.) This means that roughly 80% of the notes playable on a guitar can be played at more than one location. So when you are reading most notes on the guitar, you need to make a decision about the location, especially if the music is more than just beginner exercises. The choice of which fingers and which strings to use to play a passage on guitar depends on context and on the complexity of the piece of music, and the notes that precede or follow it might cause a guitarist to finger something differently in order to have logical continuity and sensible fingering strategy. Matters of taste also enter, and some guitarists prefer to finger certain series of notes one way as opposed to another. These caveats or considerations are not the same as when someone is reading music on any of the instruments in the orchestra or a marching band, other than a small percentage of situation in the string section. The musical distance between strings on a violin or cello is 7 half steps (frets), there are only 4 strings, and the bow can only play 2 at a time. Mathematically this means there are far fewer permutations and choices than on the guitar of how to finger particular notes or groups of notes that show up on more than one string, and unlike the guitar, the musical distance between strings is constant. Except for extremely high positions on the neck, no notes normally appear on more than 2 strings on a bowed string instrument. The guitar has more strings, they are musically closer together (4 or 5 half steps), and many players, especially troubadours playing alone, sound far more than just one or two strings at a time. Tunings Tablature and Notation Alfabeto There are quite a number of surviving alfabeto books, that coincidentally seem to have died out in the early 18th century, at the same time that both the piano, the modern 6-string guitar and the reading of standard musical notation became established. The first piano was made in Padua, Italy in 1709 by Bartolomeo Cristofori, and modern “standard tuning” EADGBE replaced the 5-string baroque guitar not much later. Along with its associated skill of sight-reading of music on the staff, the keyboard established firm control of music education, theory and composition that it has still not relinquished. These converging timelines seem to corroborate my theory that the guitar family of instruments began to be viewed disparagingly from this point on unless they were used for their version of sight-reading. Written guitar music began to be shifted in pitch (transposed) by an octave to allow it to fit reasonably on just the G or treble clef, the upper half of the so-called grand staff, which corresponds to the right hand of a piano player, and what is used for the violin. The mid-18th century stands out as being the turning or tipping point where the 6-string standard-tuned guitar, piano, staff and notation systems all variously locked into place and reached their modern forms. The so-called “great composers” consolidated their reign of terror over the peasants who were strumming their chords and singing their “vulgar” rhyming songs. The Arrival of Audio If you lived in a rural area in the days before recording, you could only learn quite a number of musical skills if there were teachers nearby, or if they visited frequently. Recordings and radio changed that instantly and forever, though as we will discuss, it was at least 25 years before rural black music was played on the radio anywhere, and at least another 25 or 30 years until it was heard outside of very localized regions. That music was only able to travel by being inside the musicians, in a broadcast signal, or in the grooves of records. Old recordings are particularly valuable to study, and I talk about them a great deal. There are millions of them, and they offer a datable and clear window into at least part of the musical knowledge of the past and present, and remain the only evidence we have of this music that didn’t live on paper anywhere. In addition to motivating record companies to record rural music to make money, and helping musicians learn from each other, recordings especially simplified the problem of learning from someone of a different race in the segregated American South. It would never have been easy for a black musician to circulate in a white community, or for a white person to go where the blacks lived and played music, though it may have been less problematic for children than adults. If you could get hold of a record made by of someone of another race, the sounds coming from the phonograph machine weren’t as intimidating or taboo as dealing directly with either the musicians or their culture. The age of recording and radio likely did more than we will ever know to mingle and disseminate the musical contributions of musicians of all colors and classes. Both oral and aural learning are somewhat opaque to people who only play music from a printed page or don’t play at all, though there is really nothing mysterious about either of them if they are what you do. I have done both types all my life, essentially every time I learn a song. Learning from your friends or parents is not fundamentally different from learning a song from a record, especially once you know how the guitar is tuned and what the basic chords are. Learning from recordings is often easier, because you can repeat things until you get them. It’s hard for some 21st century people to grasp the importance of recordings in the learning of music, partly because video is so ubiquitous now and because there hasn’t been much recorded music in their lifetime that was just a snapshot of someone playing a song. In 1928 it was obviously a revolutionary and helpful thing, since at that time every recording was made by putting a microphone in front of something that was actually happening. After about 1970, the overwhelming majority of recordings have been multi-tracked and overdubbed to the extent that it is almost unheard of for anyone to make a commercial recording by just putting a microphone or even multiple microphones in front of musicians who are playing music simultaneously. Now it has even reached the point that most popular songs could not possibly be played by any group of musicians playing any instruments, since they are collages of sounds assembled in a computer program, and did not originate as human performances. Internet video is quickly replacing audio as the primary pathway of oral learning, making it useful to compare our present era with what happened 90 years ago, the last time there was a comparable paradigm shift in musical learning. There must be another set of parallels with the arrival of the printing press in the 15th century. Many musicians in the past became important to history and to the spread of musical styles, songs and ideas primarily because of their positions in the media landscape, not just because of their talent, charisma, ambition or marketing abilities. The Carter Family are a superb example– their significant sales of records, far more than their personal appearances, impacted their legacy in American country music. But likely the single largest factor in how much influence they had on other musicians may have come from their three-year presence, beginning in 1938, on Dr. John Brinkley’s Mexican border radio station XERA, the most powerful radio signal in the history of the U.S. They could be heard loud and clear every night, from the Yukon and Nova Scotia to the Caribbean, performing live on the Consolidated Chemical Hour, which was recorded on aluminum discs and re-broadcast the following morning. An interesting sidebar to this story is that Maybelle Carter’s very unusual home-made and ultimately very influential guitar style was not correctly copied by listeners, and now there is barely a single player anywhere who plays the way she did. Now that some video has surfaced of her playing, you can see her very odd right-hand technique. Other early adopters of radio similarly benefited immensely as a result. There are many congruities between the early pioneers of radio and recording and 21st century “viral” musicians on the internet. About Tone, Dynamics and Style As an interesting example of how recordings quickly began to influence musical learning, ragtime music appeared about the same time that recordings did, being the first widespread addition of syncopation to the stiff meters of the printed page. Ragtime was likely a post-slavery consequence of African-Americans applying African polyrhythms and syncopations to European music forms, and it may well have been able to spread because of recording technology. Who knows how many musicians had been doing those sorts of rhythmic variations in localized areas? Robert Cantwell thinks that ragtime piano got its trademark syncopated swing when pianists began copying African-American stringed instrument styles, especially banjo. It is not well-known that Scott Joplin played banjo before he took up piano, and historians have even zeroed in on the influence of a banjo player named Plunk Henry that Joplin met at the 1893 Chicago Exposition. People may have only been able to learn the “feel” of ragtime because they had heard it done and got the gist of what was called the “intoxicating” syncopation orally, and not just from the page. This era marked the beginning of adding rhythmic complexity to popular American music, and coincided almost exactly with the arrival of cylinder recordings, and with the mechanical “player piano.” Joplin did not record any cylinders, but made some paper piano rolls. Even though ragtime’s rhythmic complexity was simpler than the rumba, samba, calypso, James Brown’s funk or the reggae beats that were to come in the 20th century, it obviously hit a nerve in a public that was already saturated with piano music, and started popular music culture adopting rhythmic elements in ways it had never been able to do before. Learning Music “Troubadour Style” Ruth Crawford-Seeger and those Folksong Transcriptions A child prodigy pianist, Harvard-trained and highly-celebrated Ruth Crawford became an extremely respected modernist musician and composer, who in her heyday circulated at the highest levels of music. Though she did most of her creating between 1923 and 1933, she is still commonly tagged as the most important American female composer of the 20th century, and some of her works are performed to this day by important ensembles. The first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for musical composition, she became very interested in American folk music following her marriage to Charles Seeger, also a composer and a product of Harvard University’s music department. Both Seeger and Crawford admitted to barely knowing anything of even the existence of American folk music before the mid-1930s, other than being aware there were British Isles ballad remnants being found in the rural South. Crawford had done some transcribing work with Carl Sandburg on his “American Songbag” folk song book in 1926 that seems to have kindled her life-long interest in folk music. After she married Seeger in 1932, they both plunged headfirst into the folk music world, working closely as a team and with Robert Gordon, John and Alan Lomax, Sidney Robertson Cowell, the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song and other folk music organizations and advocates. While not composing and raising four children, who included notable folk musicians Mike and Peggy Seeger and her increasingly influential stepson Pete, Ruth accepted a job transcribing over three hundred folk music field recordings (for a dollar a song) into piano arrangements, for publication in folksong books to be sold to the public and put into schools and libraries. The Lomaxes (and others) exerted tremendous effort to collect thousands of these now-famous field recordings, but once they were placed on a shelf in a library the feeling arose that more should be done with them. 190 of those songs, including Annie Brewer’s March 1937 recording from Montgomery, Alabama of “Hush Li’l Baby,” appeared in the 1941 John and Alan Lomax folksong book “Our Singing Country.” Another comparable batch of transcriptions were published in “Folk Song U.S.A.” in 1947. Annie Brewer’s song, one of twelve she recorded for Lomax, went on to become known by countless millions of people as the “traditional” lullaby “Hush, Little Baby,” after it was published and released on a series of folk recordings, beginning with The Weavers in 1951. Crawford-Seeger’s piano arrangements became firmament among the folk songs taught in public schools, especially those from her highly-regarded 1948 book “American Folk Songs for Children.” Her work seemed to have triggered a “movement” to use these collected American folk songs with school children, who liked them more and learned them faster than what they had been using in music education. This music felt so much more alive and appropriate than the European songs that had been standard fare for elementary school music, and Crawford-Seeger excitedly tested out songs in Silver Spring, Maryland at the nursery school where her children Mike and Peggy were enrolled. (This took place two miles from where I grew up, though before I was born.) Though she intended her arrangements to be “simple enough to be sight-read by the average amateur,” those transcriptions remain as the only available physical form of that music, and as a unique but fundamentally unchallenged body of work bridging American oral tradition music and European-style pedagogy. Her immense credibility as a classical music “insider” lent some strange kind of authority or legitimacy to the efforts of the folksong advocates, who apparently felt they needed the support and respect of the music critics and big-city arts insiders to accomplish their goal of proclaiming the value of American folk songs. Crawford’s reputation no doubt boosted the image of the whole project in the minds of those observers, and her name appears on the 1941 book cover as “Music Editor.” Yet arguably an alien setting was created for the humblest and most raw of the “people’s music.” The corresponding field recordings that she transcribed have been and still are nearly totally unavailable for public listening, and critiques or analyses of strengths and weaknesses in her transcriptions remain entirely within academic henhouses guarded by academic foxes. It is very hard to know how to evaluate her work, which ultimately seems to have become at once important, ignored and unquestioned. In her preface, she described a kind of song called a blues holler, “whose fluid tonal and rhythmic subtleties could on no stretch of the imagination be put into notation suitable for sight-reading,” indicating that she knew that written notation was not capable of capturing all folk music accurately. Yet she went ahead and did just that, in spite of the fact that the sound recordings existed as both an archival form and as educational tools on their own. There was an imperative in the mid-20th century to get these “folk songs” onto paper, and the wisdom or value of putting a projected image of those songs into stark black and white notes on staves of notation for piano is never brought up. Nor is the issue of whether they might have legally been creations of their so-called “sources.” Music teachers reading folksong transcriptions put them into my brain as we sang them in elementary school music classes, and professional folksingers learned and spread certain versions of them widely. Questions arise about the validity and relevance of music learned via these transcriptions, or of why it was important for team Lomax-Seeger to even make them. Why didn’t they just find folk musicians who played piano and record them? If the non-piano music was so good, why bother arranging it for piano? Why not hire music teachers who play guitar and banjo, a question some of us have been fruitlessly asking? Crawford-Seeger was one of the architects of what was certainly a well-meaning conspiracy, but a conspiracy nonetheless, to teach Americans in their homes and children in their school music classes what ultimately were artificial and bowdlerized arrangements of songs that were taken from unwitting American individuals. Appropriated and re-packaged as “folk songs,” they were said to belong to all of us, but they were carefully copyrighted, controlled and monetized by the collectors and their publishers. Crawford-Seeger became a unique and enduring but hidden link in what was a significant and sustained effort to take oral-tradition music out of the mouths and hands of rural musicians, put it into notation on paper, take ownership of it, and embed it into music teaching. Sight-readers and children everywhere could then learn genetically-modified versions of folk songs without having any idea what the songs originally sounded like. Even more oddly, 28-year-old Alan Lomax didn’t like the complexity of what Crawford-Seeger did with many of the songs in their first collaboration, so for the second batch he forced her to transcribe not the original field recordings, but his own versions of the songs, which he had learned by listening to the recordings. (Any musician who has heard Lomax’s recordings might be immediately alarmed at the idea of his musical performances being a standard for anything important. Somehow his name now shows up as the artist on many field recordings he made, so it’s a little tricky to find the songs he actually sang, like “Rich Old Lady” or “Black Betty” from the 1958 “Texas Folk Songs” album. It’s also hard to find out that John Cole played the harmonica or that Guy Carawan played the nice guitar and banjo on that album, and that Lomax merely sang, though he did know how to play some guitar.) All the decisions about meter, timing, and subtleties of the music were made by Crawford-Seeger alone, or with the assistance of her husband and Bess Lomax Hawes, Alan Lomax’s sister. Crawford-Seeger wrote comments like, “Do not ‘sing with expression’ or make an effort to dramatize,” and “Do not hesitate to keep time with your foot,” though she fought and failed to have printed in its entirety in that book a somewhat legendary eighty-page monograph on her approach and feelings about folk music. Titled “The Music of American Folk Songs,” it remained out of print for 64 years until 2003, though her hundreds of transcriptions and piano arrangements live on. Most of what was included in the 1941 book were her suggestions on reading the music. These comments were telling: “The guitar or banjo is to be preferred. The harmonica, fiddle, dulcimer, auto-harp and accordion are appropriate. The piano, if it must be used, should not obtrude; it can easily submerge the voice in conventions foreign to the spirit of the songs.” So if the piano should perhaps not even be used, and wasn’t played on the original recordings, what was the point of working so hard to make admittedly inadequate piano notation for the songs, other than merely reasserting the dominance of the piano and of written notation in music education? Here I am hot under the collar about folklorists again. This has been standard operating procedure in folklore, where the considerable effort of putting “folk songs” onto paper and into compilation books created a new monetization and dispersion of modified forms of the art that has almost exclusively benefited the compilers and editors rather than the creators or performers of that music. Folk music producer and arranger Milt Okun expressed the viewpoint of the literate music world: “composers like Dvorak had mined their own folk traditions and opened up everyone’s eyes to the riches and beauty… it is everyone’s music– our music.” Legally, it wasn’t everyone’s music, but it has taken a long time for that realization to sink in, and many a folksong source has been mined and exploited as if it were timber or minerals on public land. There is widespread public awareness of the exploitation of musicians by record companies in music business monetizations, but the comparable situation built around printed transcriptions and arrangements of the so-called “folk songs” is far less understood and little-discussed. Technically, it is probably true that what looks like outright theft to us now was actually immoral rather than illegal, since most of it happened before the Copyright Act of 1976 assigned ownership of copyright to creators at the moment of creation, and not at the time of filing registration paperwork with the copyright office. Had Annie Brewer, Rebecca Tarwater (1908-2001) or Emma Hays Dusenbury (1862-1941) filed copyrights for the ballads they sang into the folklorists’ recording machines, and if they or their heirs had remembered to renew those copyrights within 28 years, they might have had legal grounds to sue for infringement, though before 1976 a written transcription of music was required to file for a copyright. Dusenbury, who was blind, dirt-poor and 72 years old when she was recorded, was semi-literate and didn’t even have a social security number, and would have had no reasonable chance of preparing the paperwork to protect the intellectual property of her versions of the 116 songs she sang into the folklorists’ microphones. No doubt they seemed utterly valueless to her and probably everyone else in 1936, as she sat in her flour-sack dress on the porch of the leaky shack she shared with her 46-year-old spinster daughter Ory in the remote Ouachita hill country near Mena, Arkansas, a handful of miles from the Oklahoma border. With this image of Mrs. Dusenbury in our heads, singing for the nice, educated people from Washington who were so interested in the old songs she knew, let’s jump backwards in our time machine a thousand years or so and examine the troubadour landscape in North Africa and Southern Europe. I'm trying to raise issues, questions and awareness in the world of modern troubadours... I want people to find this in web searches and to read it. I don't have a way for you to comment here, but I welcome your emails with your reactions. Feel free to cheer me on, or to disagree... Chordally yours, HARVEY REID ©2021
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