The traditional way for a classical chamber ensemble to learn a piece of music is from a score. This occurs not only because it is a tested, widely adopted, and convenient means of transmitting information, but also because classical groups often play music by composers who are no longer living. Musical literacy is a useful skill which provides access to vast libraries of music for anybody who is eager to learn it.
But musical practices will always require oral instruction to flourish. Many of the nuances of performance are demonstrated rather than explained, and some practices go beyond what the score indicates. Also, the kind of notation we are talking about comes out of the specific cultural context of Western European classical music, and it doesn’t adapt well to every sort of music.
Comparing the benefits of notated scores with oral traditions isn’t only about the delivery of information: it is also about musical processes. The way you learn a piece of music affects the results (another twist on “the medium is the message”). The composer who works with a score is building and editing their piece using that tool, much like how an architect uses blueprints, and it inevitably influences the way those structures are built. Conversely, pieces which are created by memory and demonstration often benefit from frequent iterations of feedback in the room with performers. The performers are memorizing the music in ways that benefit embodied learning, gradually scooping smaller packets of information into larger ones.
Lately, Sō Percussion is working with more collaborators who don’t use notation to create. This is a departure for classically trained musicians, but percussionists have always had a foot in both worlds.
The Nature of Percussion
A percussionist like me growing up in the US in the late 20th century jumped in and out of musical contexts all the time. My first drum teacher showed me how to play certain beats, and told me that my ability to comprehend them on a score was irrelevant compared to developing good rhythmic feel. This practice process involved repeating beats over and over again, varying small elements, practicing fills, and eventually listening to songs on recordings to learn from great drummers.
The first assignment I can remember was to go home, pull out my mom’s Beatles LP’s, and carefully dissect Ringo’s playing on “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Here Comes the Sun.” I was to learn the basic beat he was using, analyze the fills, and notice when he changes the texture by changing from the hi-hat to the ride cymbal, all by ear.
My family endured years of solo practice sessions in the basement, where I played in my headphones alongside John Bonham and the rest of Led Zeppelin, while to those in the house it was all one interminable drum solo. The essential takeaway from my drum lessons was that the dots on the page give only the basic instructions for what the music itself contains. The best formulations I’ve heard for this concept are that “the recipe is not the cake” or “the map is not the territory.”
When Sō Percussion started, we deliberately set out to embrace the classical music context so that we could establish the percussion genre more firmly in it. But each of us in the current group had spent time making music without scores. When Josh Quillen studied steel drums in Trinidad, all the pieces were composed and taught orally, as they were also in Bali when Jason Treuting studied Gamelan there. Jason, though he is a quick reader, prefers to play without a score whenever he can manage it.
To make our point about the viability of percussion chamber music, most of the pieces we developed in our first ten years were score-based. A large work like David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature is so detailed in its composition that it is nearly impossible to memorize (I’m sure nothing is impossible, but I’ll never attempt it with that one). But if percussion is going to remain open to a wide range of influences, it just doesn’t want to stay inside classical music’s boundaries for too long: much of the best rhythmic thinking comes from places like West Africa, India, and South America.
How they are different
The primary advantage of notation for performers is that we can play a higher volume of music of a larger variety of styles with less rehearsal time. Digging into a musical text and comparing its elements out-of-time across pages is also fascinating. It allows a composer to encode information that resists riffing and variation by subsequent interpreters.
The main disadvantage of notation is something that the Swiss pedagogue Emil Dalcroze realized was an issue more than a hundred years ago, and worked to remedy: a studious fixation on the score which discouraged the musicians from communicating with each other and moving their bodies to the music. This divides the brain’s natural engine, which is thought to process rhythm and movement in the same place.
One of the first things Sō Percussion tried to incorporate into our classical percussion playing was a sense that movement was natural in percussion playing. We practiced memorizing small chunks of music so that we could visually communicate with each other while playing. Most great classical musicians either memorize music or become so proficient with the score that they barely need it.
The main advantage of learning music by rote is the way that it helps you absorb and lump information in your brain. Music which is taught by rote is usually conveyed more like language: lots of repetition, with occasional slowing down to review micro-chunks when required (this depends very much on the tradition and its methods. Jason recalls being distressed that he was expected to learn a melodic cycle in Bali by simply listening to the entire cycle at full speed over and over again until he caught all the notes).
The drawbacks from learning orally aren’t necessarily disadvantageous: that judgement relies to some degree on cultural values. It doesn’t allow you to shift as easily between different styles of music within the same performance framework. You are typically being taught within a tradition that accumulates tools and techniques that everybody knows. Also, it makes it a bit more difficult to preserve compositions without subjecting them to variation and riffing, but occasionally that is encouraged (i.e., a composer doesn’t expect an intact original version of their piece to remain in perpetuity).
As a performer, rote learning and memorization of scores bring you face to face with the biggest advantage of being off the page: embodiment. With rote learning, the experience is even more powerful because you are learning every note, in small phrases and full run-throughs, at all tempi, always focused on the instrument and your body. This affects your sound, your confidence, and even the way you hear the music in your head.
”If you can’t dance and play at the same time, you are on the wrong island”
These were the words of the drill instructor (kind of like a conductor) in the Skiffle Steel Orchestra of Trinidad when we played in the Panorama finals in February 2020. Through Josh’s connections, we assembled a 10-day trip to Trinidad, where we conducted a residency with students at the University of Trinidad and Tobago, and then rehearsed and performed for a week with the Skiffle ensemble. The big steel bands in Trinidad’s Panorama are about 120 players, and the sound is so loud it is like a physical force (which I suppose it actually is).
Each year, the competition pieces are these Fantasias based around popular Soca songs. Some arrangers, like our friend Kendall Williams, work with scores but teach the pieces by rote. Others build the pieces entirely without notation. Regardless, the majority of the musicians do not read music, so the extremely complex pieces are taught note-by-note in marathon rehearsal sessions.
This means that after assembling a small phrase by teaching each section their parts, the entire ensemble will run the phrase at different tempi until it starts to flow better. The arrangers listen to the results, and they don’t always even keep the material after they’ve taught it. I was astonished and a little panicked that the arrangers were introducing changes to the piece up to the night before the competition. But the ensemble was so adept at learning quickly that they picked up the changes and incorporated them.
This also means that the performers are exposed to some parts of the piece as small packets of information before they appear in the context of the whole composition. When they stitch that part of the composition together with another part later on, the notes are just there in their hands from the previous micro-focus. Your “hands” know what to do, and in your mind you relax and assign that section with one object in your mind: “ok that’s the “A” section, I know that.” When we refer to our hands, we mean the seemingly automatic movement and pattern execution that the brain facilitates when music is fully embodied.
Small musical mind objects, when embodied, can be lumped into larger objects so that you aren’t consciously thinking of every detail, but keeping track of a birds-eye-view of the landscape: “ok, we are about here, my hands are moving, in 8 bars we are going to this other section.” Eventually, when it’s all really there, the entire piece floats by as in a dream, and the only way you can usually mess it up is by becoming too self-conscious of your effortless sequence of movements. In a piece with maximal repetition, like Steve Reich’s Drumming, this is a massive pitfall because the conscious brain can interrupt habitual activity by saying “whoa that’s cool I can’t believe I’m still just doing this over and over again.”
Here is the Panorama performance. To date, it is one of the highlights of my performing life. The experience left a considerable impression on us, and it stoked our curiosity to try this process with other artists.
What we are working on now, and how we do it
Four current projects exemplify this gradual broadening of our approach. As it happens, each one comes out of either African or Afro-diaspora music. The truth is that once you open yourself up to working without scores, you realize how peculiar the western notation practice is. Most music traditions don’t use it, and most choreographers, theater directors, DJs, and many rock musicians don’t either.
These artists are all percussionists, but in incredibly diverse ways. Kendall K. Williams is a steel drum performer and arranger; Olivier Tarpaga is a choreographer, drummer, dancer, and composer from West Africa; Michael Love is a tap dancer; and Shodekeh Talifero is a beatboxer, vocal percussionist, and breath artist.
Kendall K. Williams
Fresh off his newly defended Princeton dissertation, Dr. Kendall K. Williams is completely fluent with notation. But he grew up in pan yards, standing on a bucket before he was tall enough to reach the instrument. Kendall has written several scores for So Percussion. After our experience in Trinidad, we asked him to compose a Panorama-style quartet for mallet instruments that he would teach us note-by-note, making changes along the way as he heard the music. This results in many hours in the studio together, and closely resembles experiences we’ve had working with choreographers like Susan Marshall, who always try things with bodies to understand how their work is shaping up.
After a year of sporadic work, we have about five minutes of music. Each note has been crafted, reworked, and absorbed at a level that makes the final product electrifying to play (and hopefully to hear).
Because we work in chunks and then go off to do other things, establishing some sort of documentation process still matters. As plentiful as quill ink and paper seem to have been in the 18th and 19th century, video storage is now. We have been taking video of rehearsals and archiving them, always capturing the last run-through of material so that we can refer to them in-between and right before the next working session.
I also do some transcription after the fact, but I try very hard to use this as a reference and not as my performance mode.
Olivier Tarpaga
Our colleague in the Princeton Music Department, Olivier is a choreographer, composer, dancer, and musician from Burkina Faso. Like all the artists in this group, he is rooted in both traditional art forms and also the contemporary avant-garde. Together, we teach a new course at Princeton on rhythm for the undergraduate curriculum, which employs a multipolar cultural approach.
Because he is a choreographer, Olivier is always thinking about movement. When we were working on a Balafon-inspired marimba piece, and we suggested playing with our fingers, he became entranced by the picture of our bodies hunched over the instrument and the ways our hands dance on the keyboard while we touch the bars.
Olivier’s mother comes from a village called Dola in Burkina Faso. In most of Burkina Faso, Balafons are played by a single player, but, uniquely in her village, instruments of extended size are played by more than one musician at a time. As we experimented with playing some of his patterns on the 5-octave marimba, Olivier realized that he had unconsciously composed patterns that reminded him of being in that village as a boy and watching these group Balafon bands.
Olivier’s sense of time and groove is distinctive. Most of his fast notes are played in a way that we might now call “swing,” and it is not a coincidence that the feel of American jazz resembles west African drumming. As with jazz, it is not really possible to represent this rhythmic feel in notation, and Olivier distinguishes between several shades of rhythmic feel that would all conventionally be notated the same way.
Michael Love
A tap dancer is both dancer and percussionist. If it was only a matter of coordinating movement to sound, we could consider our collaboration to be the ordinary interdisciplinary work of choreographer and musicians. The rhythms of tap have a direct bearing on the music, particularly with percussion, so in some ways it is more helpful to think of our work with Michael Love as a percussion quintet.
For our piece with Michael, we worked with our own unique notation shorthand that Jason developed in pieces like Extremes, where letters stand in for rhythms. Despite its complexity, Jason composed the music to have an audible pulse that Michael could latch onto. Then it was a matter of sculpting the composition so that we left space for Michael’s dazzling virtuosity to shine through.
Shodekeh Talifero
With Shodekeh Talifero, we bring together distinctive rhythmic practices that converge on the experimental in Vodalities, a piece which combines breath art, vocal percussion, and beatboxing with physical percussion. While we are both rooted in musical scenes that provided the original spark for our creativity – contemporary classical music and hip hop – our collaboration draws on decades of collective experience that pulls together influences like John Cage, Meredith Monk, Bobby McFerrin, and a range of Hip Hop and House music artists.
We started working with Shodekeh during the pandemic. He composed the three movements by recording tracks with his voice and sending them along to us. We then used a mixture of transcription and adaptation to translate his vocal sounds into physical percussion playing.
How it changes things
Thinking about how “the recipe is not the cake” has helped me distance myself from the emotional and cultural baggage of notation, and paradoxically has allowed me to enjoy it more. Many tools of documentation and transmission exist. Using notation to interpret and document music, and not only to receive it, has opened up new ways of thinking for me.
For years, I have had a practice of rewriting my parts for So pieces from scratch. It allows me to open up creative avenues for how notation can help facilitate my learning style. Working without notation has awakened the parts of my brain that helped me study Ringo when I was ten years old, and has improved my process for learning music immeasurably.