Especially for Bach, although this question could really apply to any period in Western music before mechanical and computer recording and playback tools were widely available.
My question is, since physical scores were so essential to music at the time, to what extent was composition, particularly more complex contrapuntal devices, a a visual process? Did most composers see a score in their heads as they wrote, like a sequencer in their mind's eye? Are there any letters or diaries by composers describing visualizing music in this way as being important?
I wonder to what extent, say, Bach visualized extremely complex fugal structures and "saw" the playback as he wrote. Techniques like permutations seem--looking at a piece of music on paper as "architecture" might tempt someone to rotate it in their head, and it seem like being able to do this would help greatly in hearing these things. How common is retrograde inversion and the like in non-Western musical traditions, or does it even exist? If it doesn't that might suggest some connection between a score-based musical culture and these kinds of techniques. I guess this is a part of the bigger question of the ways a reliance on written music shaped classical music in general. After all, avante-garde "eye music" that is mathematically and visually interesting and horrible to listen to relies heavily on these sorts of transformations.
This seems like it would be the only way to really write efficiently, no matter how talented you are. It seems like the skill of audiation would be as tied to reading musical scores as it would be visualizing them and writing them down. And there are the stories about Beethoven writing stuff down in such a frenzy that he would run out of paper and write all of his walls (not sure where I heard or saw this depiction or how true it is), not "playing back" somethign a bunch of times in his head and copying it out. I imagine revisions were more of a fine-tuning and salting to taste rather than correcting something they misheard, 'cause Mozart wasn't going to get a transcription wrong.
I thought of this question when I heard a film composer talking about dreaming of notation software and sequencer playback in his head and seeing all the, where visualization of music is a side-effect rather than a primary compositional tool.
Thanks!
I was rather hoping some musicologist with Classical background would wander by to pronounce authoritatively on Mozart, et al. And you might consider re-posting this sometime, to see if you could catch one. But I find the question interesting in light of what we’re finding out about music of the Renaissance. Anne Smith, in her The Performance of 16th Century Music, documents a music culture that relied surprisingly little on paper. Performers, composers, teacher, instead worked lot with solmization- like the medieval “Guidonian Hand”- that tied pitches to not only syllables ( ut re mi etc.) but also the fingers and parts of the hand. Performers would learn their parts quite often with just this method of communicating, and so it seems that composers also tended to think in terms of parts, voices: not scores with harmonies, chords. This comes as a bit of a surprise, as there is plenty of 16th c. iconography showing people reading music and plenty of printed music survives, . And of course people doing Early Music today work with printed music quite a lot. As the earliest forms of musical notation are thought to be representations of hand gestures indicating rising and falling pitch, this gestural way of working with music goes back very, very far: possibly even before Guido ( though I don't know). So, while you wonder if visualization of the score or written music was critically important to composers, it looks like for a long time it was not. You can see an English choir being directed with the Guidonian Hand here doing Mass L'Homme Armee. (Obviously, singers in the period would memorize the places on their hands, not have them marked with ink!)
Though it seems as though it would be hard to rely on memory to work with compositions, it may not have been. Systems of cultivating memory have been around for a very long time. Plato describes a declaimer of poetry who would walk down a street and memorize a verse in front of every door, then in his mind simply walk down the street again, in order to call up the poem. This tying together of two or more different things to make it possible to recall one is still a common technique, and it is indeed what the Guidonian Hand does: each note is assigned a gesture, and a name. And of course in the medieval/Renaissance world, ink , paper and parchment for every musician in a choir or ensemble would be a significant expense.
When or if music does become attached to visual score would be nice to know, and I am sure someone else could better pronounce on this. Even some 17th-18th c. composers, like JS Bach and Bodin de Boismortier , can be thought of as still working mostly with voices, and they might not have been thinking of a score. But when most composed western music went to accompanied monody, with the Italians in the 17th-18th c. working out all the language for dynamic and tempo markings, it seems that thinking of gestured voices had to have become harder and harder to do. And when you get into the 19th c. , with all the rich possibilities of instrumentation available with a big orchestra, it seems like thinking of a written score would become critical, not just for the markings ( like Beethoven asking for a bit to be played Turkish, in the last movement of the 9th) but because things are being done just for the sound, not for the more and more complex harmonies. Ravel once said that his Bolero was “effects without music” and he made a good point: it really is a noodling melody surrounded by all sorts of different orchestral colors. It really has become almost a theatrical exercise, that needs a script.
Wili Apel The Notation of Polyphonic Music