In 2015, I bought a vintage saxophone mouthpiece, an MC Gregory 4A 16M, in the hopes that I would instantaneously become Paul Desmond in both tonal character and human personality. All I got was similarly bad eyesight and a love for cigarettes.
Still I adore him to no end. Hearing his version of Emily forever changed my view of what was musically possible. Here was somebody who could seemingly bridge the gap between baroque and jazz, all while improvising.
There's tonnes of transcriptions of his solos all over the internet, and me being a rather big fanboy, tried my damned hardest to copy his intonation and lyricism. It never made me a better improviser, mostly because I was approaching jazz improvisation in a classical 'read-and-play-what's-written' kind of way. As Alec Openshaw would later advise me, "Transcribing is the best way to learn how to improvise."
But what about transcribing as a way to teach? So much music is not written down in Western notation. Even Jacob Collier and his complete overload of music theory may record straight into DAW sessions. Does June Lee's transcription of the same song teach the viewer/listener anything more useful than if left untranscribed? Does it take anything away from the artistic integrity of the original recording? In other words, can notation be a useful tool in contemporary music education?
Yes. Obviously.
Notation shouldn't be at the cost of authentic music making. In the end it seems most appropriate to call it a specific linguistic interpretation of what music sounds like or should sound like. But much like reading transcriptions of Trump's interviews shows us how effective he is in making imperative statements (even if they are conceptually really dumb), music transcription/notation explains why and how the wriggly air makes us feel feels.
Now that we've established a why, how do we notate? Computers have really made pencil on paper feel outdated.
We explored in our Zoom conference today, a variety of notation software from in-browser Musescore, Noteflight, Flat.io to hardcore offline software like Sibelius, Dorico, and Finale. Each seem to have strengths and weaknesses although Noteflight's marketplace for selling arrangements really stood out as a tool for sharing music. Dorico seemed efficient in scoring large and instrumentally extensive compositions, and James the Sibelius wizard, demonstrated how to use Sibelius in the way it was designed to be used:
This is Idea Capture! Perfect for when you want to make musical motifs or if you're transcribing jazz liiccckkksss.
Also worksheet! So easy so fast so good!
Legit took me longer to save and upload that photo than to create the worksheet. Such a powerful too, to be used wisely of course Uncle Ben.
Is any one of the software better than the rest? No...? I don't really know, although I suspect the paid ones like Sibelius would allow greater facility for notational freedom. Whatever the fuck that means.
James did emphasise the point of being fluent in one of these softwares though, as although notation and transcribing are just musical tools at our disposal, more tools the merrier. This tool be speaking too much. Does this blog get too like middle-aged-mum-trying-really-hard-on-her-recipe-blog kind of feel? Maybe less words next time...