A melody, a harmony or a rhythm (or all three together) can touch us to the point of being tempted in return to touch the music itself: by playing it on an instrument or singing it. But how can we touch music, which is by definition impalpable? Transcription has taken on this mission: to fix it in order to share it better. From the spoken word to the written word, and vice versa, transcribing gives life back.

"By the end of our first meeting, I had learned that there would be no score. [...] My job would be to write down all the instrumental parts for the small ensemble of French musicians, who would wait for the scores. My first contacts with Indian classical music were recent and not very encouraging. I'd listened to a concert recording of Ravi [Shankar] and didn't understand a word of it. Instead of panicking, I asked him - "begged" would be a better word - to start composing ahead of time. [...] I didn't realize at the time the impact this learning process would have on my music. At that moment, in that recording studio on the Champs-Élysées, I finally possessed the conceptual tools necessary to accomplish my work."(1)

In 1966, Ravi Shankar played the title role in Conrad Rooks' film Chappaqua . Ornette Coleman's music having been rejected by the director, he asked Shankar to take his place, enlisting the help of one of Nadia Boulanger 's students: Philip Glass. The task was more than complex for the young composer, who was visiting the capital for his studies. He was unaccustomed to Indian music, where improvisation, albeit extremely structured, was de rigueur. Willy-nilly, he managed - not without anguish - and his musical language remained marked throughout his life. He reunited with Shankar years later (in 1990) to record one of his greatest albums, Passages, on which the crossover between written and unwritten music produces marvels of musical intelligence. 

Why transcribe

Listening to this album, classified - for want of a better word - as "world music", one wonders where improvisation begins and precise notation ends. The work was premiered in France in 2019, at the Philharmonie de Paris, by musicians who had not taken part in the recording. To achieve this, a score had to be created for them, and a transcription made. In Western classical music (and therefore in contemporary music), notation has always had a certain "superiority" over improvisation. To open the doors of the great concert halls, to win honorary prizes of all kinds and the recognition of one's peers requires putting one's music down on paper so that it can be read, played, judged and heard. Leaving a musician free to improvise without having spent hours bent over a score does not give the image of a serious musical vision.

Proof of this can be found in the long-standing contempt shown by certain contemporary composers for jazz, an improvised music by its very nature. The paradox is that jazz is certainly the most transcribed improvised music today... because this music has become institutionalized and is now taught in the top schools. Transcribing and playing a solo by John Coltrane(Giant Steps of course!), Miles Davis or Oscar Peterson is part of the learning process. In fact, it has become a challenge on Youtube for some music geeks to record these improvised solos to the very last note, as shown by this splendid improvisation by Jacob Collier, precisely transcribed - right down to the fumbling of the left hand... 

The gap between the written and the unwritten has widened steadily as notation has become increasingly precise and detailed. In the history of music, the composer was often the interpreter of his own music (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Rachmaninov), but these two professions have tended to become increasingly distinct. Liszt improvised a lot when he played his works (and those of others). Today, to improvise in Liszt, Chopin or even Boulez would be unthinkable - even sacrilegious. The interpreter must adhere to absolute fidelity - brandished as a virtue. In the Baroque era, a figured bass and a melody were enough to make a work, and composers trusted their interpreters. The closer we get to the present day, the more detailed the scores become, leaving the musicians less and less freedom. Sometimes these scores are so saturated with indications that only a computer can meet this demand for exactitude. 

The pleasure of playing

Musicians with backgrounds in jazz, electroacoustic, alternative and experimental music have retained a certain freedom: little or no notation, just a canvas or grid. But the price is high: without notation, it's impossible for others to reproduce their work. And yet, transcribing an improvised piece of music so that another musician can make it his own is a past practice, and one that is increasingly used thanks to composition software.
Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert is a typical example. According to the pianist, "improvisation is the only way to be present and true to oneself". So this improvised concert, which has become a cult favorite, was quickly transcribed to satisfy musical fans eager to put their fingers on this legendary music, born spontaneously in Germany in 1975. A reading of the score (validated by Jarrett himself) shows just how limited notation can be for such music. The entire musical vocabulary is insufficient to express the timelessness of this music. For this reason, continuous listening to this concert (recommended by the musician himself) seems essential to better approach it. Editing an improvisation is not a trivial matter for a musician. It means freezing what wasn't meant to be frozen in the first place, and at the same time breathing new life into his "work" (i.e., in this case, his record) through a new interpretation. 

Those who heard him confirm it: the improvisations of French composer Déodat de Séverac, a convinced regionalist with a keen interest in French folklore from the Southwest, far surpassed any of his written works. The spontaneity, freedom and in-the-moment energy offered by improvisation certainly allowed him to blossom and distance himself from the rigidity of writing. As a result, his finest works remained unwritten.
The Hungarian Béla Bartok, the Armenian Komitas and the Australian Percy Grainger did the same, drawing their inspiration from the folk music of oral tradition. These artists did an invaluable job of collecting and transcribing folk tunes - often despised by the academic world - recording them as sound archives and integrating them into their original compositions and
A whole area of musical art destined to be transmitted only orally thus became accessible to all those who read music. The fixed unwritten becomes popular more quickly and gains a form of legitimacy, an institutional recognition. In the case of Komitas, it also allows the voice of the poorest, the oppressed and the forgotten to be heard, as in the popular song of 1905 recounting the Armenian massacres, collected and sublimated by the composer.

From sound to writing

One after another, music bookshops are closing. But what exactly is the cause of the near-total disappearance of music stores in France? If buying a novel from your local bookshop rather than Amazon is a smart, eco-responsible move, then downloading it free of charge from IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project - an online library of over 432,763 royalty-free scores) or ordering a score over the Internet has become an unfortunate, but all-too-common reflex among music lovers (and professionals alike).
Here's the beginning of an explanation for the scarcity of music bookshops. But it's not the only one. Music notation declined sharply in the second half of the 20th century, with the advent of recording. You can be a well-known musician or a famous pop-music group without ever having held a pencil to a staff (or used a computer). In fact, it was the ability to preserve a musical performance without writing it down that enabled the extreme popularization of music, which has become a more than profitable economic sector.

The ability to record has totally reshuffled the cards in the world of musicians. It is now possible to play and spread music without knowing how to read a treble clef, simply by playing and recording it. With the complexities of solfeggio reading a thing of the past, the amateur with itchy fingers can finally share his music.
The music of Harold Budd, Brian Eno and William Basinski (to name but three of the popes of ambient music) exists on recordings and is popularized as such.
However, recent years have seen an upsurge in concerts in which these purely phonographic works, which have never been published, are played on stage. Eno's Music for Airports , for example, was transcribed by Didier Aschour for his ensemble Dédalus; Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, by the same composer, was performed by the ensemble Sturm und Klang at the Ars Musica festival in Brussels on November 19, 2022; The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski was performed at Le Lieu unique on November 25, 2022 in a live version with orchestra.
The paradox of this unnotated music becoming (notated) through its success highlights that: 1/ live music is not dead, as is sometimes claimed (even if the recent pandemic has not helped to counter this opinion); 2/ transcribing an unwritten musical work remains the best way to bring it to life.

 

Mission possible

As long as there is composed music, there will be musicians to play it.
No matter how it's composed, we'll have to find a way to learn it. For the moment, solfeggio notation remains the simplest and most universal (and complicated at the same time) way. Alternatives do exist: on YouTube, there are countless piano, violin and other tutorials explaining visually - inspired by the video game Dance Dance Revolution (cult Japanese video game of dancing with the feet) - how to place your fingers at the right moments on the instrument; except that this method evacuates everything that makes music worthwhile (nuances, articulations, phrasing, etc.) and is only interested in the musical elements.
Oral transmission by imitation is also a much-used solution, but it excludes the solitary pleasure of learning and de facto prevents us from tackling works of great polyphonic complexity.
The solution therefore remains transcription. The most rigorous fidelity is the great challenge of this practice. 

Here are a few examples of special transcriptions.
Giacinto Scelsi didn't write down his music. He would improvise at the piano, and a transcriber (the best-known of whom was Vieri Tosatti) would rewrite the whole thing on a score. He would then isolate himself and, following exchanges with Scelsi on questions of nuance, orchestration etc., would note down the music precisely: he was " composing Scelsi ". Without this transcriber, who would play Scelsi?
Georges Gurdjieff and his friend, the Ukrainian composer Thomas de Hartmann, in Paris, collaborated to compose pieces of staggering beauty in a highly original way: Gurdjieff, by the fireside, would whistle, sing, murmur melodies captured during his youthful travels in the Orient and Asia for Hartmann to note down on the piano. The result was a collection of more than 160 pieces of imagined or real folklore.
Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow wanted to do without the technical limitations of performers, and long before the invention of computers, he began composing directly for roller player piano (the only instruments capable of playing so many notes with diabolical rhythmic precision). His way of transcribing music, then, was not through solfeggio, but simply by piercing those famous rollers by hand. Thomas Adès took the opposite route, transcribing some of his famous Études transcendantes for two pianos.

Scores by Gurdjieff - Nancarrow - Lauten

Elodie Lauten, a French composer who trained with Monte Young and was a friend of Terry Riley, was a virtuoso pianist whose piano works were often improvised by herself. Kyle Gann, a living memory of minimalist music from the 1970s to the present day, spent a great deal of time transcribing some of her seminal opuses(Cat Counterpoint, Adamantine Sonata, Sonate Ordinaire, Sonate Modale, Variations on the Orange Cycle) in order to understand her way of composing.
He explains: "Although she composed many ensemble works in conventional notation, improvisation was a comfortable way for her to compose, and she considered a piece finished after she had played it - notation was not necessary. Her pieces evolved as she played them, gaining or losing sections. Like La Monte Young, who briefly mentored her, she conceived melodic and harmonic relationships that had a recognizable identity but could be improvised in extensible patterns. These are very important and beautiful works, and I hope it will be possible to secure for them a permanent place in the historical repertoire."(2)
Having spent hours putting La Monte Young 's The Well-Tuned Piano down on paper, and unveiled Dennis Johnson's masterpiece November (1959) to the world, Kyle Gann continues his incredibly faithful enterprise of transcription, so that today's performers can in turn make these unwritten works, these ineffable spontaneous compositions, their own. 

François Mardirossian

(1) Philip Glass, Words Without Music, Philharmonie De Paris, 2017.
(2) Kyle Gann, Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser - Delivered to the Minimalism Conference in Helsinki, September 2015 - https://www.kylegann.com/Lauten-Postminimalist.html