Transcription
An early, rather unglamorous step in this project is transcription. There are, however, some hidden benefits. Essentially, we are inputting the notes from the “Performing Edition” from the Bärenreiter set into notation software. I use Finale, which I first learned to use in high school, but I’ve had students use Muse Score with good results. Our goal is to have a stable digital version of the notes that you can use as the baseline for exploring the sources. This will make it possible to easily manipulate it later with articulations, slurs, fingerings, and more. For violists, this is helpful to get it into alto clef. Along the way, you can also start adjusting the spacing and formatting.
In this step, you will confront the first real, editorial decisions in this project. When discrepancies in pitch and rhythm arise between the sources (a few times per movement), you need to decide which notes to actually write down. I’ll pick one option but won’t agonize over it—I postpone the final decision until later. But make sure to put a mental asterisk on each, so that you can play the differing versions later.
While most of this step is grunt work, you gain a certain closeness to the actual materials of the music during this process. Throughout history, copying music was an essential part of studying composition. For composers like Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, hand copying the works of others was a way to get inside the pieces and the minds of the composers, and it was a major pedagogical tool. While typing into a keyboard isn’t as fluent as handwriting, I still acquire a more intimate understanding of the notes than if I had just picked up a score and started playing. For example: I use Finale’s Speedy Note tool to input the notes, so in order to notate a leap of a perfect fifth up, I have to tap the up arrow four separate times. I can feel the steps needed, and start to understand from a tactile perspective the arrangements of steps and skips in the musical lines. Is this a major discovery? No. But any scrap of insight is a bonus in this project, and transcription certainly provides it.
This gets at the overall crux of this project: spending the time to notice things. The closer and closer we get to the music, the more we notice. This project forces us into many modes of interacting with the music, more just staring at a printed page and playing it. Every different mode can give us a new shred of insight. We copy down the notes in Finale, you proofread your typing, you even listen to the MIDI playback, we deal with page layout, you look at the spacing of the notes, you stare (for a long time) at the facsimiles, you interpret the slurs, and so on. Not many of us would, say, re-notate the Hindemith sonatas, since already have solid, definitive editions. But with the Bach, we gain this closeness and intimacy with all of the materials, and this is real discovery begins.
Happy typing!