When Tomoko was a
little girl taking piano lessons, she had to buy her piano books and sheet
music. That is still the case for most pianists, although now those scores are sometimes
downloadable from the Internet.
Basically, sheet
music is just a way to codify music to allow others to reproduce it without
having to listen to it directly and try to imitate it by memory. The first
evidence of musical notation was found on a cuneiform tablet in Iraq. Later,
papyrus and paper were used to transcribe music by hand.
Even with the advent of printing, usually
just the staffs with its lines were printed; the notes had to be hand-drawn
afterwards because the placement of the notes, along with lyrics, was so
critical. Fifty years later, the other score elements could be printed too, but
it took three “passes” of the printing press to get all the elements in place accurately.
By the mid sixteenth century, the staff lines and notes could finally be
printed in one pass.
As an alternative,
the score could be engraved on metal plates, and then re-used for future
printing, which was efficient for popular pieces; nowadays, photographic
engraving is used. The music could be reproduced as a picture (like a photo), but that process
assumed that a score was already produced. That was still a problem with the
advent of the computer.
Since the 1980s
software has been developed to enable composers to “type” musical scores with increasing
sophistication, which could then be printed on a graphics printer. Now a person
can play the notes on a MIDI device, and the computer will generate a MIDI file
of sheet music. Some software programs
include a play back feature so the composer can listen to the piece in
development, which facilitates its refinement.
Nevertheless, even
with the perfect piano sheet music, the actual performance is only as good as the
pianist. There, Tomoko exemplifies refined technique and interpretation. The sheet music comes alive!
