Color-Encoded Music Scores: What Visual Communication Can Do for Music Reading

Abstract

N ot long ago, a group of adventurous young people-three girls and a boy-accepted my invitation to play a Bach chorale together on the piano. Why adventurous? Because none of them could play the piano or read music. Two hours later, the whole piece was played, from start to finish, by these four musical novices. For this to be possible, the traditional musical score had to be transformed to better communicate the music. Established early in the present millennium, traditional musical notation was clearly not meant by its creators-Christian monks transcribing sacred music-to be accessible to a wide public. So the system developed, becoming ever more abbreviated and complex, always aiming at faithfulness to the composition, but entirely neglecting the other half of the communicative process-namely, the reading, or decoding, of this complex notation. Now, however, as the end of the millennium draws near, two factors make the present time particularly ripe for a critique of the music-reading process: the advent of visual communication as a field of study and Piaget's pedagogical theory. The purpose of this article is to present the genesis of a new musical notation system geared to expanding the musicliterate public-a self-evident musical score. My intention is to encourage readers to try this bold experiment for themselves-that is, to try to play Mozart's Sonata XVI or Satie's Gymnopedies while reading scores written with this musical notation system.