[musictlk] unified english braille

[Brunhilde Merk-Adam]

FYI - NLS blog from today.


  Braille Graphic Scores

January 22, 2015by Katie Rodda 
<http://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/author/krodda/>

If you had ever been a music student, then you have no doubt come across 
the /Norton Anthology of Western Music/. This tome compiles the standard 
repertoire of Western art music presented in history, theory, and 
performance classes, and describes the music with historical notes and 
other contextual information.

For some time, the Music Section of the National Library Service for the 
Blind and Physically Handicapped 
<http://www.loc.gov/nls/music/?loclr=blognls> (NLS) has had the older 
editions of this canonical item, but we did not have the sixth edition, 
which adds more music and a third volume dedicated solely to Twentieth 
Century music.

But, we are happy to announce that the third volume of the /Norton 
Anthology/ sixth edition was just added to the NLS collection 
<http://www.loc.gov/nls/catalog/?loclr=blognls> this month.

The scope of this volume is something worth noting. As previous editions 
had clumped all music from the Classical era to the Modern era, it gave 
little mention of modern avant-garde classical composers. The sixth 
volume, however, contains music from many more Twentieth Century 
composers, including Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, Morton Feldman, 
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Arvo Pärt, and György Ligeti, among others.

Besides being an integral addition to our holdings, it is also a 
brilliant feat of braille music transcribing (done by transcriber 
Christina Davidson <http://www.ctdcreations.com>), as it is over 20 
volumes with some of the hardest-to-transcribe music scores. Such pieces 
as /Projection I for Cello/ by Morton Feldman and Penderecki’s /Threnody 
to the Victims of Hiroshima/ use graphic scores or altered notation, 
which do not follow the rules of standard music notation.

Feldman’s piece in particular, which uses geometric figures over the 
course of a graphically represented x-axis of time, cannot be 
transcribed at all into standard braille music encoding. Standard 
braille music notation is inherently linear; that is, all information 
that is conveyed to the musician is laid out in a horizontal fashion, as 
one would read words.

In Feldman’s piece, each rectangle represents a different timbre to be 
produced on the cello. The location of each rectangle (whether low, 
middle, or high) represents the general pitch that the soloist should be 
playing, and whether the cello should be plucking the strings 
(pizzicato) or using the bow (arco).

A Sim-Braille (braille font) excerpt of the Morton Feldman piece 
"Projections I" 
<http://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/files/2015/01/blog-10-photo-cropped2.jpg> 


[Insert:  graphic]  A Sim-Braille (braille font) excerpt of the Morton 
Feldman piece “Projections I.” Thisimage shows what the braille on the 
page for this piece would look like.  End insert.]

To get around this problem, the transcriber described these inherently 
visual scores through text, as well as by providing the score as a 
tactile graphic. Tactile graphics are common in braille to aid in 
reading an inherently visual resource, such as a map or a graph. The 
example of the tactile graphic score for this particular piece is 
exhibited above.

Twentieth Century music is an indelible part of Western art music 
history, and the third volume of the /Norton Anthology/ sixth edition 
shows just how impactful this era of music has been to the modern age. 
The music section of NLS <http://www.loc.gov/nls/music/?loclr=blognls> 
is committed to ensuring that all music, specifically such inherently 
visual material as graphic scores, is as accessible for the blind 
community as it is for the sighted.

The third volume of the /Norton Anthology of Western Music /can be 
ordered from the NLS Music Section 
<http://www.loc.gov/nls/music/?loclr=blognls> with catalog number BRM 
36037, and is also available for download from BARD (Braille and Audio 
Reading Download) <http://nlsbard.loc.gov/?loclr=blognls>.

Posted in: Braille 
<http://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/category/braille/>, Braille Music 
<http://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/category/braille-music-2/>, 
Braille Music Transcribers 
<http://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/category/braille-music-transcribers/>, 
Music History and Appreciation 
<http://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/category/music-history-and-appreciation/>, 
New Acquisitions 
<http://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/category/new-acquisitions/>, 
Uncategorized <http://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/category/uncategorized/>