What the Score Does Not Tell You

Here is a sentence that sounds like a paradox and is not: the notation is complete, and the information is not.

A score of a Bach suite specifies the pitches exactly and the rhythms exactly. Nothing is missing by the standards of the notation; there are no blanks, no illegible passages, no places where the composer trailed off. And it will not tell you how loud to play, what tone to use, how much the tempo may breathe, whether a dot over a note means short or merely detached, or how to fill in an ornament sign.

None of that is an oversight. It is a score written for a reader who had those conventions, in the way that a recipe saying "season to taste" is written for somebody who has cooked before.

The conventions lived in people. They were taught by demonstration, in guilds and households and cathedral choirs, and they were not written down because everybody who needed them had them. Which means that when the transmission chain broke, the information was gone from the page and gone from the practice at the same time, and the score stayed as precise and as uninformative as ever.

Recovering it is a research problem, and the discipline that does it is called performance practice.

The evidence is indirect and quite rich. Treatises, written mostly for amateurs, which spell out what professionals took for granted. Surviving instruments, which tell you what was physically easy and what was not. Letters, pay records, descriptions by travellers, organ specifications, the dimensions of rooms. Tutors for children, which are often the best sources precisely because they explain the obvious.

The clearest single example of the gap is notated inequality.

In French music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pairs of notes written as equal were routinely played unequally, long then short. This is not a secret: the treatises say so, repeatedly, and they disagree about how much, because the amount depended on the tempo, the metre, the character of the piece and the taste of the player. There is no symbol for it in the notation.

So a performer who plays those pairs evenly is reading the page correctly and playing the music wrongly. The notation gave them no way to know. That is the entire problem of notation in one case, and it should make you suspicious about every other convention that was too obvious to write down.

Which brings up the question of what an edition should do.

An edition that supplies dynamics and phrasing silently is making dozens of decisions on your behalf and hiding them. That was normal practice for a long time and it produced generations of players who believed that Bach wrote forte at the top of the prelude. An urtext edition prints what the sources contain and marks every editorial addition, usually in brackets or a lighter typeface, so you can see whose decision each marking is.

The point of that is not purity. You may well end up playing the editor's dynamics. The point is that you know they are the editor's.

And the useful habit, when a score is silent, is not to treat the silence as freedom. It is to ask what a contemporary player would not have needed told. A dance movement came with a tempo attached to the dance. A church sonata came with expectations about tone. The blank on the page is a pointer into the practice, and the practice is partly recoverable, which is a much more interesting situation than either reverence or licence.