So…Why not staff notation?
This question has often been posed by students or teachers who have been trained in the past or are learning staff notation. We would really like to analyse this question in some detail so this blog post aims to address some main points.
Staff notation originated from European classical music and has now spread throughout the world as the (arguably) preferred form of musical notation. This notation uses a five-line staff, wherein each line indicates a pitch. The round notes are placed on the lines or spaces in the staff and the pitch can be modified with accidentals (Sharps (♯) or flats (♭)). Stems are added to the round notes to indicate duration (For e.g. ♩ – quarter note). The staff generally begins with the clef which indicates the pitch of the notes on the staff. Following the clef, the key signature indicates the key (or the musical scale) of the piece. After the key signature, the time signature indicates how many beats per bar.
As a music piece becomes more complicated, more symbols are added to communicate exactly what the composer wants.
For a beginner, all this information can sometimes be hard to process. Since staff notation is pictographical in nature, the reading of it does not come naturally to most people. Of course, this is open to debate, for many musical prodigies and other musicians find that the way the notes move up and down the staff actually lends itself to picturing the way the notes are positioned on a piano or the way the pitch rises and falls. But for a student who has learned to read the alphabet and whose mind is conditioned to letters and words, this form of musical language is difficult to learn. Teaching staff notation typically involves a 3-step process.
- Teaching the names of the notes on the instrument as C, D, E, F, G, A, B.
- Linking these notes with the pictographical notes on the staff. This is done typically with mnemonics like EGBDF – Every Good Boy Does Fine.
- ‘Translating’ the notes on the staff once again to the corresponding positions on the instrument.
So initially, a student’s progress in reading music is slow since he/she is ‘translating’ what is seen on sheet music to letters, which he/she then has to map to the actual position on the instrument.
Often, students find this so hard to learn, that they look for shortcuts. Some ‘translate’ staff notation to the CDEFGAB notes and write the song out before practicing and once they have memorized the song, would then go back to the sheet music and ‘pretend’ to read the music. This practice can easily be identified by the difficulty a student then has when he/she is asked to play from the middle of a piece. Others take years to learn and still struggle to ‘sight-read’.
Another challenge is uniquely faced with Indian music (Hindustani or Carnatic), which does not follow the same principles of Western music. Staff notation has been designed primarily with western classical music in mind, with its emphasis on harmony, chords and modulation. Past attempts to use staff notation for Indian music have largely failed, and many who do use it face unique challenges. Indian music makes use of hundreds of ragas, and so it becomes difficult to write Indian music without the use of many accidentals. Furthermore, the notions of key and absolute pitch are deeply rooted in Western classical music and staff notation requires that a song be played in a certain key. However, Carnatic music does not specify the key and prefers to use scale degrees (relative pitch) to denote notes. These are but few of the many challenges Indian musicians face when trying to fit their music into staff notation.
So as we can see there is room for improvement in two clear areas.
- Ease of learning
- Ease of use for Indian music
This is precisely where our Westernized-Indian notation tries to fill the gap. Another blog post will explain the benefits of our notation in more detail.
