Capturing Music by Thomas Forrest Kelly

[mjzee]

The ancient Greek chorus wasn’t called a chorus for nothing. The theatergoers of Athens expected it to sing. You would never know this from modern practice: Think of the 1957 Tyrone Guthrie film of “Oedipus Rex” or, better yet, the comically serious version of Sophocles’ tragedy that Fred Astaire watches with alarm in “The Band Wagon” (1953). In any number of modern performances, tuneless choruses chant in dismal unison. What happened to the music of Greek theater, which for Aristotle was “the greatest of the pleasurable accessories of tragedy”?

Alas, it is lost to us. Unlike the text of the plays, the music wasn’t set down on tablet or papyrus in any way that we can now reconstruct. As Thomas Forrest Kelly observes in “Capturing Music: The Story of Notation,” music was for centuries preserved through an aural tradition—songs were learned by listening.

In our age of recorded sound and easy playback, it is hard to imagine how fragile and ephemeral music once was. We may have the architecture and art of, say, the eighth century, Mr. Kelly says, but we don’t have the music. He quotes Isidore of Seville, the early medieval scholar and cleric: “Unless sounds are held in the memory by man they perish, because they cannot be written down.” Mr. Kelly’s fascinating book tracks the centuries-long process by which pitches and rhythms were codified.

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WSJ

(Or Google the review's title "Making a Note of It")