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New tunes for old farts


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Our version of notation was refined as a way for the church to ensure that missionaries would teach new "converts" far away to pray/sing the exact same way as they were doing close to home. It was about control. Since this was largely monophonic and all vocal, notation basically WAS a MIDI track.

 

I completely agree that in an age when the source is so easily accessed even from "far away," a youtube video or midi track is much more of a "score" than any transcription or chord chart would be--as we all know from the pile of shitty chord charts abounding online.

 

However...there is still a need for some kind of instruction book or recipe that we can all follow when gathering to make music together for the first time in real time, which often happens in public on a job. We can't tell the audience to go smoke a cigarette while we huddle around screens watching youtube tutorials. So whether it's our MEGA-CONTRIVED splotches on a page system or something else, it will still end up being some arbitrary set of metaphors and semiotics that we all just agree will mean the what/when/how of the song we are all there to play, decoded in real time.

Now out! "Mind the Gap," a 24-song album of new material.
www.joshweinstein.com

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if the human species manages to continue at something close to its current level of technological development for a few more generations (which I regard as a very big "if," but that's another matter), music notation as we know it will die out because more efficient and intuitive ways of communicating the same information will render it obsolete. The people like us who think it's great because we developed an emotional attachment to it through all the effort we put in to master it back when the other kids were going to parties and getting laid will grow old and die, and the people who come after us won't form those same irrational attachments because they'll have no need to. There will still be a handful of people who understand notation, but they'll be as rare and socially deviant as people who have conversations in Latin today.

 

I won't even begin to try to predict the future, but in certain arenas I just can't imagine anything more efficient than the system we have now. Yes my imagination is limited. But how do you pull together an Oscars award show without everybody being able to come in and read the thing down?

 

Reading opens so many doors and enables so much conservation of mental effort and time that is makes it possible to do a day like: shedding classical music in the early AM, heading to a studio session at 10 AM for which someone has scribbled out charts, heading to a big band or top 40 or musical gig that night. Without reading each of those things would still be possible but take much longer.

 

It also frankly allows us less than genius level players to have a viable career. I have hundreds and hundreds of tunes written out to play at the ballpark, various top 40 gigs, etc.. I don't have them memorized. I could spend the rest of my life doing that or I could raise my daughter and enjoy a balanced life, and then get to any of those gigs and play those tunes down at a moment's notice.

 

I just don't see what could replace reading as we have it now to increase that efficiency. But again how do I know what's going to happen. I will say as reading is what ties us to being able to perform all the great classical literature of the last 400 years, it won't be going away that quickly.

Kawai C-60 Grand Piano : Hammond A-100 : Hammond SK2 : Yamaha CP4 : Yamaha Montage 7 : Moog Sub 37

 

My latest album: Funky organ, huge horn section

https://bobbycressey.bandcamp.com/album/cali-native

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