Tag Archives: music transcription

Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton and the Power of Notation

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“Jelly Roll Morton.” 2019. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 2019. https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/jelly-roll-morton. ‌

Often referred to as one of the “fathers of jazz”, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton was one of the pioneering faces of jazz to come in the early 20th century.  Born in 1890 in New Orleans, Jelly Roll was at the forefront of the burgeoning genre of jazz.  By age 10, he was playing in bordellos blending ragtime, minstrel music, and dance rhythms: the basis of jazz1
.  When he left New Orleans to travel the country as a musician, he often credited himself with the creation of jazz.  While this claim was, and still is, disputed by many, it is impossible to deny that his tune, “Original Jelly Roll Blues”, was the first published jazz work.

“IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana.” n.d. Webapp1.Dlib.indiana.edu. Accessed October 12, 2023. https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/metsnav/inharmony/navigate.do?oid=https://fedora.dlib.indiana.edu/fedora/get/iudl:384651/METADATA&pn=3&size=screen. ‌Accessed via Sheet Music Consortium

Morton was far from the first to play and perform jazz, but publishing a work gave his claim serious credibility.  To notate something is to is legitimize it, and that is exactly what Morton did.  Many people of the time, especially white people, drew clear distinctions between jazz and classical music, high and low art, by the basis of their notation.  To them, jazz was disorganized and sloppy when compared to the precise scores of orchestral works.

So notation legitimizes, but is it always in the best interest of the music? Is something lost? In Morton’s score of The Jelly Roll Blues, he consistently uses dotted sixteenth notes tied to eighth notes to allude to a swing feel, but if a musician read the ink as-is, it would still be lacking.  A true swing feel is subjective, and nearly impossible to fully quantify.  By being forced to notate jazz, one “establishes the objectification of subjectivity”2.

In class, we’ve discussed the difficulty of transcribing some genres from Native music to Appalachian folk music.  In his article, “Country Music and the Souls of White Folk”, we see the impossibility of accurately transcribing Tommy Johnson’s “Cool Drink of Water Blues” 3.  The 32nd notes and triplet rhythms in the transcription surely wasn’t the true rhythm of the song, but it was the only way to quantify and notate it.  While notation helps the legitimization and dissemination of music to the masses, it may not always be necessary.  For oral/aural traditions, notation and transcription removes an irreplaceable essence of the music.

1“Jelly Roll Morton – Songs, Music & Facts.” 2021. Biography. April 27, 2021. https://www.biography.com/musicians/jelly-roll-morton.‌

2Marian-Bălaşa, Marin. “Who Actually Needs Transcription? Notes on the Modern Rise of a Method and the Postmodern Fall of an Ideology.” The World of Music 47, no. 2 (2005): 5–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41699643.

3Nunn, Erich. 2015. Sounding the Color Line : Music and Race in the Southern Imagination. Athens ; London: The University Of Georgia Press.

 

Works Cited 

“Jelly Roll Morton.” 2019. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 2019. https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/jelly-roll-morton. ‌

“IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana.” n.d. Webapp1.Dlib.indiana.edu. Accessed October 12, 2023. https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/metsnav/inharmony/navigate.do?oid=https://fedora.dlib.indiana.edu/fedora/get/iudl:384651/METADATA&pn=3&size=screen. ‌Accessed via Sheet Music Consortium

“Jelly Roll Morton – Songs, Music & Facts.” 2021. Biography. April 27, 2021. https://www.biography.com/musicians/jelly-roll-morton.‌

Marian-Bălaşa, Marin. “Who Actually Needs Transcription? Notes on the Modern Rise of a Method and the Postmodern Fall of an Ideology.” The World of Music 47, no. 2 (2005): 5–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41699643.

Nunn, Erich. 2015. Sounding the Color Line : Music and Race in the Southern Imagination. Athens ; London: The University Of Georgia Press.

Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: Marian Anderson and Spiritual Transmission

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Marian Anderson in 1951

Marian Anderson occupies a unique position in history. Born in 1897, the contralto represents the culmination of hundreds of years of musical transmission and development along with the continuously evolving nature of American Culture.

Her recording of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen made in December of 1924,specifically, illustrates the complex history of spiritual transmission. First described as part of an 1866 description of a shout held in an old cotton gin house by an author named only M.R.S., and later transcribed in the 1867 collection Slave Songs of the United States, this shout, like many, has a rich transmission history. Since its initial transciption, the shout has been taken on tour by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and performed by a number of artist from Louis Armstrong to Mahalia Jackson (here’s a playlist of different versions of the Nobody Know’s the Trouble I’ve Seen).  Below is the 1924 recording (remastered and brought to you courtesy of Spotify) of Anderson’s. Take a listen to the recording while you read the rest of this post.

So why this recording?

Anderson would debut in Europe at Wigmore hall in London in 1930, and later, would famously perform for a crowd of 75 000 at the Lincoln Memorial after she had been denied a performing space at Constitution Hall on racial grounds. Before all that, however, she made these recordings of spirituals, shouts, and work songs. What is striking about this recording of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen is Anderson’s vocal technique and how that reflects contemporaneous American cultural ideologies.

The technique used on the recording echoes the sound Anderson uses in the works she most frequently performs; the Lied of Schubert. Her use of classical technique to cover a song that had once been a ring shout is telling of the way Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen has changed over time. While some may argue that her technique is simply a result of her classical training, I would posit a more insidious explanation. As the Fisk Jubilee Singers demonstrated through their early performances of traditional spirituals, often times the vocal technique used when singing spirituals had to be altered so that the original spiritual could be safe for white consumption. The emphasis on western tonality as the only acceptable and marketable base for music contributes to the erasure of diversity in the “American” musical canon.  Zora Neale Hurston in her work Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals goes so far as to argue,

There never has been a presentation of genuine Negro spirituals to any audience anywhere. What is being sung by the concert artists and glee clubs are the works of Negro composers or adaptors based on the spirituals.

While this recording shows Marian Andersons’ devotion to performing spirituals, it also demonstrates how capitalist necessity and white supremacy absorb and appropriate any culture deemed to be “the other” and, in doing so, prohibit any genuine presentation of a spiritual.

Transcription of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had from Slave Songs of the United States (1867)

At the start of a career, it is incredibly important to build an audience, and if the majority people who were paying for her recordings wanted to hear an “idealized” spiritual, an “idealized” spiritual is what they would get. Classical technique and pure westernized vowels would reign supreme over the original spiritual singing technique which placed greater emphasis on expression of lyrics and rhythm.  The influence of white audiences on the sound of spirituals like the one exhibited here can be seen as symptomatic of a larger societal problem wherein white tastes and experiences are centered over those of people of color. Marian Anderson’s recording of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen represents another chapter in spiritual transmission and simultaneously serves as an example of the ways music reflects and influences dominant culture ideologies.

 

Just a Note: The articles on Marian Anderson from the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and African American Music Reference  focus heavily on her amazing performance at the Lincoln Memorial. Take a break from scholarly journals and learn more about it from this NPR article. Also, if you want to learn more about Anderson, check out this other playlist of her performing spirituals and pieces from the Western Classical canon.

 

Photographs From Marian Anderson’s Website

Works Cited

“Anderson, Marian, 1897-1993, by AMG, All Music Guide.” In All Music Guide: The Definitive Guide to Popular Music, 1. San Francisco, CA: Backbeat Books, 2001. Accessed October 3, 2017. http://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbiography%7C438020.

Epstein, Dena J. Sinful tunes and spirituals: Black folk music to the Civil War. Urbana Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Max de Schauensee and Alan Blyth. “Anderson, Marian.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed October 2, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/00865.

Tick, Judith, and Beaudoin, Paul, eds. 2008. Music in the USA : A Documentary Companion. Cary: Oxford University Press, USA. Accessed October 2, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Williamson, Etta L. The Journal of Negro Education 26, no. 1 (1957): 38-40. doi:10.2307/2293324.

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/09/298760473/denied-a-stage-she-sang-for-a-nation

Slave Songs of the United States 1867

 

 

 

Transcriptions and Telling the Whole Story

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Upon studying an unfamiliar culture’s music, there are many different aspects of the music that could be taken into account. Simply the notational aspects of the music can be notated, such as pitches, rhythms, dynamics, tempos. However sometimes there are extra things that a western 5-lined staff cannot display in detail, such as pitch-bending, amount of vibrato, sliding, and tone-quality. This has been a challenge for many ethnomusicologists for years.

Two transcribers produced books regarding some to their findings about Native American Song. Theodore Baker published his dissertation Über die Musik der Nordamerikanischen Wilden (On the Music of the North American Indians) in 1882 while studying in Leipzig. His book describes most of the primary characteristics of the music he witnessed, like the rhythm, singing quality, dancing, and instruments. His notations include grace-note ornaments and chromatics slides. However, Baker does not go into detail how these features fit in with the music he transcribed, nor does his commentary note what function the music plays in Native American Spiritual life.

Frances Densmore, a well known ethnomusicologist, published The American Indians and their Music in 1926. Her book contains many of the same features as Baker’s, except her transcriptions do not include any grace-notes like Baker. However, she offers far more written context on the music. She has a whole section devoted to each dance, game, and Native American life. Overall I think that Desmore captures more accurately the meaning behind the music.

When looking into another culture that is not one’s own, it is important to mention all aspects that go into music because does not just involve the print ink on the page — it involves our cultural experiences and knowledge.

Analysis and Anthology of Black Folk Music in the 1800s

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During the 1800s when it was booming in popularity within white America, black folk music was transcribed by white people interested in monetizing the replication of the music. Many anthologies chronicling black folk music were produced, transcribed by white people of educated, important stature in society, along with critiques and analyses on the subject. One of these anthologies is Reverend William Eleazar Barton’s Old Plantation Hymns: A collection of hitherto unpublished melodies of the slave and freedman, with historical and descriptive notes.

Within its cover, Barton gives an account of his “quest for quaint hymns” and the conversations he has with people along the way fo fulfill this quest.

barton1

Figure 1

His anthology contains descriptions and observations of the performance practice of black folk music characteristic to the overt white mentality of superiority of the time.

barton2

Figure 2

barton3

Figure 3

griffin1

Figure 4

 

 

 

 

 

The issue with white Americans transcribing black folk music is that they would often transcribe one verse of a song in standard notation and then include the next verses below. This would allow for those wanting to sing the music to do so, but often fill in all of the rhythms incorrectly or without the same feeling from verse to verse.

 

griffin2

Figure 5

Another person who was very invested in the reproduction and performance of black folk music was Reverend George H. Griffin. In his article, The Slave Music of the South, Griffin pursues his passion for black folk music in a different way, ignoring extensive analysis of the music before arguing that it is a “very rich mine to explore.”

 

 

 

 

Fig. 1, 2, 3. BARTON, William Eleazar. “Hymns of the slave and the freedman.” New England Magazine 19, (January 1899): 609-624. Readers’ Guide Retrospective: 1890-1982 (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed February 19, 2015).

Fig. 4, 5. Griffin, George H. 1885. THE SLAVE MUSIC OF THE SOUTH. The Musical Visitor, a Magazine of Musical Literature and Music (1883-1897). 02, http://search.proquest.com/docview/137490866?accountid=351 (accessed February 20, 2015).