Writing at the Speed of Sound: Music Stenography and Recording beyond the Phonograph · 2019. 5....

121

J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording

19th-Century Music, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 121–150 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2017 by the Regents ofthe University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2017.41.2.121.

J. MACKENZIE PIERCE

As a sound-recording technology lasting fromthe eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century,music stenography resists standard narrativesof sound recording’s advent and development.In such accounts, the phonograph typically playsa starring role.1 Thomas Edison’s 1877 inven-

tion is viewed as a powerful historical turningpoint largely due to its technical innovations.Although music notation had helped conveysounds through symbols for centuries, the pho-nograph reproduced sound vibrations throughmechanical means; a recording’s microscopicgrooves were a one-to-one trace—in C. S.Peirce’s terminology, an “index”—of the“sounds themselves.” In an influential account

Writing at the Speed of Sound:Music Stenography and Recordingbeyond the Phonograph

I wish to thank Erica Levenson, Annette Richards, andJames Webster for detailed readings; Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Damien Mahiet for improvements to theFrench translations; and Dietmar Friesenegger for com-menting on both text and translations. Special thanks aredue to Roger Moseley for his insightful suggestions fromthis project’s first stages. Earlier versions of this articlewere presented at the 2015 annual meeting of the Ameri-can Musicological Society in Louisville, KY and at “BoneFlute to Auto-Tune: A Conference on Music & Technol-ogy in History, Theory and Practice” at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley in 2014. Research was carried outthanks to the Donald J. Grout Memorial Scholarship Fundat Cornell University.

1The literature on sound recording is vast, but representa-tive scholarship includes: Patrick Feaster, Pictures of Sound:One Thousand Years of Educed Audio: 980–1980 (Atlanta:

Dust-to-Digital, 2012); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves,and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in theEdison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); MarkKatz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has ChangedMusic, rev. edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press,2010); Thomas Y. Levin, “‘Tones from out of Nowhere’:Rudolph Pfenninger and the Archaeology of SyntheticSound,” Grey Room 12 (2003): 32–79; David Suisman, Sell-ing Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Mu-sic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Foran exception to this focus, see Andrea F. Bohlman andPeter McMurray, “Tape: Or, Rewinding the PhonographicRegime,” Twentieth-Century Music 14/1 (2017): 3–24.

122

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

based on this interpretation, Friedrich Kittlerargues that the phonograph could capture sonicdata flows without human mediation, thus un-dercutting the need for acculturation into thereading of texts or scores.2 Jonathan Sterne like-wise views the phonograph as a key protago-nist in what has become a founding argumentof sound studies: by liberating sound from itsolder guises as music, speech, or noise, thephonograph opened the way for a history ofsound itself.3

The phonograph’s dominance in scholarlydiscussions has obscured the fact that explora-tions of text-based sound recording continuedthrough the late nineteenth century and wellinto the twentieth, as indicated by the list ofpublications in the Appendix. In contrast tothe phonograph, music stenography (or short-hand) pursued sonic fixity through the assump-tions of a literate musical practice. To capturesound, it replaced the familiar note-heads,beams, and stems of Western music notationwith idiosyncratic systems of squiggles, lines,and dots. Visually striking, these new forms ofmusical writing promised to fastidiously pre-serve a composer’s most transient musical in-spirations and to capture improvisations in realtime. Thanks to stenography, melodies couldbe jotted down as quickly as the composer in-vented them; the new notation “rival[ed] therapidity of inspiration.”4

Although speech stenography had been inuse since antiquity, music stenography was amore recent historical development. Between1768 and 1950, over seventy music-stenographictreatises appeared in cities as far afield as Chi-cago and Warsaw. Music stenographies wereinvented by professional musicians, autodidacts,respected stenographers, now-forgotten ama-

teurs, and even one director of the Paris Opéra.5If—as Alfred Cramer has shown—speech ste-nography served as a notable analogy for Ro-mantic melody, then music stenography soughtinstead to capture “music itself,” or rather,musical ideas in their moment of emergence.6To do so, music stenographers refashioned no-tation as a tool for recording. Rather than merelyenabling subsequent performance, stenographicnotation would capture musical thoughts asthey unfolded in real time.

Since music stenography recorded sound viaimprovements to writing techniques, it de-pended on the stenographer’s ability to trans-late sounds into symbols. Despite superficialsimilarities with the symbols used in ethno-graphic transcriptions, it found no “field” ap-plications; stenographers were only interestedin notating the same sounds that Western no-tation could. Why would music stenographers’concern with literate recording technologiespersist even as seemingly more powerful meansfor capturing music gained ascendancy andpopularity? To answer this question, I fore-ground the experiments and controversiesspawned by music’s textual technologies, com-plexities that are often overshadowed duringthis period by notation’s prominent role as anemissary of composers’ intentions and as a reli-able proxy for the musical work itself.7

2Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans.Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 1990); Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film,Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and MichaelWutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).3Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins ofSound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press,2003).4Hippolyte Prévost, Sténographie musicale ou art de suivrel’exécution musicale en écrivant (Paris: Prévost-Crocius,1833), 2 (“rivaliser de rapidité avec l’inspiration”). All trans-lations are my own unless otherwise stated.

5Music stenographies consulted in the preparation of thisarticle are listed in the Appendix. Catalogs of musicstenographies may be found in Johannes Wolf, Handbuchder Notationskunde, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel,1919), 419–49, and in Gardner Read, Source Book of Pro-posed Music Notation Reforms (Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 1987), 369–400. Secondary literature on music ste-nography is limited, but see Frédéric Hellouin, “LaSténographie musicale,” in Feuillets d’histoire musicalefrançaise (Paris: A. Charles, 1903), 155–67, and JacquesChailley, “Sténographie musicale,” Schweizer musikpäda-gogische Blätter 14 (1953): 15–19. Chailley mentions butdoes not describe a system that he had been using foralmost twenty years.6Alfred W. Cramer, “Of Serpentina and Stenography: Shapesof Handwriting in Romantic Melody,” this journal 30/2(2006): 133–65. Cramer touches on Prévost’s and Stains’smusic stenographies. I use “speech stenography” to referto the main branch of stenographic practice, that whichattempts to capture the speech of an orator. In nonmusicalscholarship, speech stenography is referred to simply as“stenography.”7For the standard account of textuality under the workconcept, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Mu-sical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, rev.edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 224–27.

123


Music stenography opens a window onto thecultural techniques that helped musicians trans-form quotidian encounters with musical textsinto abstract conceptions of compositional la-bor. As Cornelia Vismann explains, culturaltechniques denote how “the self-managementor auto-praxis [Eigenpraxis] of media and things”helps to “determine the scope of the subject’sfield of action.”8 Similarly, I ask how stenogra-phers’ concerns for the inscription, storage, andreproduction of musical ideas were shaped bythe material worlds on which these processesdepended. Stenographers believed that their in-ventions would revolutionize composing. Forus, however, stenographers’ unspoken assump-tions about how musical ideas become textsand their purported innovations to this processshed light on the otherwise opaque roles playedby paper and ink within the musical life oftheir day. My contention that music stenogra-phy offers insights into the material underpin-nings of print-centric musical culture may seemopen to a fundamental critique: there is littleevidence that music stenography ever reallyworked. While speech stenography was widelyused in politics, spawned translations of canonicnovels into its signs, and has even been de-tected in Charles Dickens’s mimetic prosestyle—music stenography never gained wide-spread popularity.9 While speech stenographerstranscribed and published improvised poeticperformances, stenographic transcriptions ofmusical performances have not survived; norhave I located sketches from composers whoemployed stenographic methods.10

Coated in a veneer of practicality, music ste-nography remained a decidedly speculativeproject. How, then, can it illuminate such pe-rennial historical issues as the construction of

genius, the workings of inspiration, or the cre-ation of musical texts? Failures can be instruc-tive: as Jussi Parikka and Siegfried Zielinskihave argued, the study of unsuccessful or theo-retical inventions may productively illuminatelong-lost technological assumptions of anotherera.11 Technologies that never found widespreadadoption were nonetheless products of a widerfield of know-how; these past medial condi-tions are, however, obscured by teleologicallyreconstructing the prehistories of successful,still-familiar inventions. Music stenographiesform an especially intriguing corpus to probefor insights into historical media cultures sincethey were the work of marginal figures whononetheless confronted central musical issues.Their persistent yet peripheral reinvention re-veals that concerns for the preservation of mu-sical thoughts helped shape notions of compo-sitional creativity itself.

This article begins by investigatingstenography’s intended application within mu-sic and its explicit purpose as a corrective tothe deficiencies of staff notation. I then shiftperspective from the stenographic treatisesthemselves to the wider technological and me-dial landscape of their day. Music stenography’smyriad versions, I show, are more accuratelyviewed as repeated adaptations of speech ste-nography into a musical domain, efforts drivenby stenography’s prominence within the print-based public sphere. When so seen, music ste-nography appears as part of a durable culturalproject of text-based sound inscription. At theconclusion, I suggest some ways that musicstenography helps to rethink the dominant nar-ratives of sound recording’s development.

New Symbols for Music

From Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century,to Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s, to themyriad contemporary proposals of the Music

8Cornelia Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Sover-eignty,” Theory, Culture & Society 30/6 (2013): 83–93,here 84.9Leah Price, “Stenographic Masculinity,” in Literary Sec-retaries/Secretarial Culture, ed. Leah Price and PamelaThurschwell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 32–47; StevenMarcus, “Language into Structure: Pickwick Revisited,”Daedalus 101/1 (1972): 183–202.10Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation,1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),69–72. For example, Maximilian Langenschwarz, Erste Im-provisation in München . . . Stenographisch aufgenommenund herausgegeben von F. X. Gabelsberger (Munich:Hübschmann, 1830).

11Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge:Polity Press, 2012); Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of theMedia, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2006), 13–38; Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeography:Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Me-dia,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, andImplications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Ber-keley: University of California Press, 2011), 239–55.

124

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

Notation Project, musicians have long at-tempted to improve musical writing and read-ing.12 Several music stenographers studied theearly history of notation and saw their ownefforts as its modern-day continuations.13 Evenmusic stenographers lacking antiquarian incli-nations would have been familiar with numer-ous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century at-tempts at music notation reform. Often draw-ing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Plan RegardingNew Signs for Music, reformers believed thatthe Guidonian staff posed barriers for the be-ginning student, as its “quantity of lines, clefs,transpositions, sharps, flats, naturals, simpleand compound meters, whole notes, sixty-fourth notes, [and] rests . . . yields a throng ofsigns and combinations,” which overload thestudent’s capacities.14 To simplify musical read-ing and instruction, new notations employednumbers or symbols to stand directly for solfègesyllables, an innovation that also afforded eco-nomical printing.15

Like notation reformers, stenographers em-braced new musical signs. Music stenographerswere, however, singularly obsessed with im-

proving the speed at which a notational systemcould be written, thus distinguishing them fromthe reformers’ broad-ranging interests in peda-gogy and literacy. As stenographers observed,conventional notation is a poor vehicle for real-time recording. By adding stems, flags, or beamsto indicate shorter note values, the speed ofconventional musical writing is inversely re-lated to that of note values themselves: a wholenote requires a single motion of the pen, butthe equivalent duration of thirty-second notesrequires ninety-six strokes (plate 1). In an un-ending pursuit of greater rapidity, stenographersassessed alternative musical signs for the effi-ciency of the quill motions they demanded.Even so, the more complex a piece of musicand the more rapidly it unfolded, the less ame-nable the music was to real-time capturethrough notation of any kind.

In an era when music was preserved in manu-scripts and transmitted through printed pages,stenographers and composers alike shared E. T.A. Hoffmann’s conviction that “the art of com-position” consists in the ability to hold onto“intuitions as if with a special spiritual powerand to preserve them in writing.”16 They coulddisagree, however, over the tools through whichimagined sounds could be turned into texts. In1833 Hippolyte Prévost brought his newly in-vented music stenography to the retired Rossini,who noted that “this new art would prove ofvaluable assistance to the composer, whom itwould enable to note down on paper his suddeninspirations as they suggested themselves tohim—but that, as for himself, he had never feltthe want of it.” As Rossini explained, suchassistance was superfluous for composers whohad received rigorous childhood training. In hisown case, Rossini’s father insisted that “afterhe had read a whole page of music once ortwice, he should repeat it without the notesand without a fault. Soon afterwards, it wastwo pages then three, and then four, the dosegoing on crescendo until it included an entirescore. This had to be recited by heart, afteronly a few perusals.” Thanks to such disci-

12John Haines, “The Origins of the Musical Staff,” Musi-cal Quarterly 91/3–4 (2008): 327–78; Arnold Schoenberg,“A New Twelve-Tone Notation [1924],” in Style and Idea,ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1975), 354–62; The Music NotationProject succeeds the Music Notation Modernization Asso-ciation, which was founded in 1985: http://musicnotation.org/.13Pierre Joubert de la Salette, De la Notation musicale engénéral et en particulier de celle du système grec (Paris:Normant, 1817); V. D. de Stains, Phonography; or, theWriting of Sounds (London: Wilson, 1842), 157–78; AugustBaumgartner, Kurzgefaßte Geschichte der musikalischenNotation (Munich: Wolf, 1856).14Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Plan Regarding New Signs forMusic, in Essay on the Origin of Languages and WritingsRelated to Music, trans. and ed. John Scott (Hanover: Uni-versity Press of New England, 1998), 1–20, here 3. Themost extensive inventory of notation reform attempts isto be found in Wolf, Handbuch der Notationskunde, II,335–87. See also the report by Fétis père on a competitionfor a historical survey of notation and its winner: Fétispère, “Notation musicale: rapport fait à la classe des Beaux-Arts de l’Académie royale de Belgique, sur un mémoireprésenté en réponse à la question mise au concours pourl’année 1848,” Revue et gazette musicale de Paris 15, no.40 (1848): 302–05. Joseph Raymondi, Examen critique desnotations musicales (Paris: Roret, 1856).15See Démotz de la Salle, Méthode de musique selon unnouveau système (Paris: Simon, 1728); M. de L’Aulnaye,“Mémoire sur un nouveau systême de notation musicale,”Musée de Paris (1785/1): 89–109.

16Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, “Johannes Kreisler’sCertificate of Apprenticeship,” trans. Max Knight, this jour-nal 5/3 (1982): 189–92, here 192.

125


Plate 1: Michel Eisenmenger, Traité sur l’art graphiqueet la mécanique appliqués à la musique, 81.

The first column lists note values from whole notes (top) to thirty-second notes (bottom). The second column calculatesthe number of notes of a given value that could be written in a minute, while the third column lists the number of notesthat could be performed in a minute. The last column provides the ratio of column two to three, demonstrating that shorternote values require more time to write: it takes thirty-two times longer to write a thirty-second note than it does toperform one.

pline, Rossini claimed, he was able to composearias, acts, and even entire operas in his head.So trustworthy was his musical memory thateven if he fell asleep while composing and re-mained in slumber for a ten-year stretch, hecould wake up and “evoke, note by note, thecomplete composition thus deposited in somecompartment or other of his Olympian brain.”17

To sway musicians who may have lackedOlympian musical minds, stenographers con-sistently evoked two beliefs about the natureof musical composition in support of theirprojects. First, they echoed a central tenet ofRomantic aesthetics, asserting that musicalideas were most spontaneous, fresh, and viva-cious in the moment they were initially con-ceived. Second, they assumed that such musi-cal ideas were liable to vanish from thecomposer’s mind as quickly as they had ap-peared. Hector Berlioz, one of musicstenography’s early practitioners, reported thatwhile composing the Requiem, his “brain feltas though it would explode with the pressure ofideas” and that “it was impossible to write fastenough.” He continued: “All composers knowthe agony of forgetting ideas and of finding thatthey have vanished for ever, for want of time to

set them down.”18 While Berlioz’s stenographicsketches do not survive, his agonies elicitedample sympathy from his contemporaries.19Prévost asked, “How often, in moments of verveand enthusiasm, is the vivacity of thecomposer’s inspirations stifled by this musicalwriting. . . . How often does he not have reasonto deplore being unable to conserve this firsteffusion, always so precious, where the ideaspresent themselves in all their freshness andoriginality!”20 Some nineteen years later in1853, August Baumgartner claimed that musicstenography would likewise “fix in the mo-ment of enthusiasm the first sketches, whichall too often lose freshness and originalitythrough time-robbing notating-down and passthem down to posterity.”21 Such rhetoric ech-

17Hippolyte Prévost, “A Visit to Rossini,” Musical World47, no. 49 (1869): 838. This article is as a reminiscence ofhis earlier visit.

18Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans.David Cairns (New York: Norton, 1975), 228.19D. Kern Holoman, Berlioz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1989), 215. Holoman suggests that Berliozcould be referring to the light pencil markings found in hismanuscripts, which were later covered in ink.20Prévost, Sténographie musicale, 2: “Que de fois, dans lesmomens de verve et d’enthousiasme, la vivacité des inspi-rations du compositeur n’est-elle pas étouffée par cetteécriture musicale . . . Que de fois n’a-t-il pas à déplorer dene pouvoir conserver ce premier jet toujours si précieux,où les idées se présentent dans toute leur fraîcheur et leuroriginalité!”21August Baumgartner, Kurz gefasste Anleitung zurmusikalischen Stenographie oder Tonzeichenkunst(Munich: Franz, 1853), 1: “im Augenblicke der Begeisterung

126

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

oes that of mid-eighteenth-century attemptsby both the Rev. John Creed and J. F. Unger todevelop keyboard attachments that could no-tate the transient musical improvisations ofperformers.22 Charles Burney noted that such adevice once added to the keyboard would “fixsuch fleeting sounds as are generated in thewild moments of enthusiasm . . . giving perma-nence to ideas which reflection can never find,nor memory retain.”23 If the failure of suchkeyboard devices to fully and accurately pre-serve improvisations speaks to, in AnnetteRichards’s formulation, the “unbreachable riftbetween performance and score,” then, by com-parison, music stenographers did not intend toclose this rift, but rather side-step it all to-gether.24 Most music stenographers hoped toprovide the composer with an unmediated formof textual inscription, thus evading the reli-ance on both performer and instrument thatwas the postulate of Creed and Unger’s de-vices.

Strikingly, music stenography’s guiding con-cern for transcribing ephemeral ideas retainedcurrency well into the twentieth century. Re-cast with tinges of associationist psychology,the introduction to Emile Gouverneur’s 1950Traité complet de sténographie musicale in-

vokes a trope commonly encountered in 1850,or for that matter, 1750: “So many movingideas and sublime thoughts are lost for thecomposer and for posterity because the speedof thought too often considerably exceeds itsgraphic expression. Ordinary musical notation,slow and easily deformed, blocks the integrallinking of impressions and ideas. These followin rapid succession and often disappear neverto return again.”25 On one level, the publica-tion of music stenographies into the twentiethcentury speaks to the unflagging perseveranceof music notation itself, as well as to the factthat phonographic recording did little to di-minish the importance of dictation (which is tosay the transcription of sound as symbol) inmusical training.26 On another level, however,the stenographers’ amalgamation of freewheel-ing meditations on musical inspiration withnew, writing-based inventions, presents a strik-ing temporal continuity. Stenography followeda static course of technical inquiry and remainedrelatively stable across 180 years of seismicchanges in composition, aesthetics, and socialhistory.27 It evinces both a durability and amutability that challenge the expected pointsof the narratives relaying the histories of soundrecording.

Stenographic Techniques

At their core, music stenographies aimed tomore efficiently transmit and store musicaldata. They attempted to shear seemingly extra-

die ersten Entwürfe, welche nur zu oft durch zeitraubendeNiederzeichnung an Frische und Originalität verlieren, zufixiren, und der Nachwelt zu überliefern.”22Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the MusicalPicturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2001), 76–79; Peter Schleuning, “Die Fantasiermaschine:ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Stilwende um 1750,” Archivfür Musikwissenschaft 27/3 (1970): 192–213. The threadof a now-lost device able to record improvisations from akeyboard, similar to Creed’s, runs throughout the stenog-raphers’ discussions. Prévost mentions a similar device (p.3), Eisenmenger develops both a stenography and a mecha-nism for a piano capable of producing such notations, anda review of Austin makes a similar reference (W. A. Barrett,“Musical Shorthand,” Musical Times and Singing ClassCircular 15, no. 352 [1872]: 495–97).23Charles Burney, The Present State of Music (London:1773), 214. Quoted in Richards, The Free Fantasia, 78.24Richards, The Free Fantasia, 79. Somewhat unusuallyamong music stenographers, Prévost suggests his inven-tion could be used for capturing improvisations. François-Joseph Fétis points to several reasons why Prévost’s ste-nography is unable to do so, although he agrees that it willbe useful for composers. Fétis, “Sténographie musicale ouart de suivre l’éducation [sic] musicale en écrivant parHyppolite [sic] Prévost,” Revue musicale 7, no. 31 (1833):241.

25Emile Gouverneur, Traité complet de sténographie mu-sicale (Brussels: Schott frères, 1950), 8: “Combien d’idéestouchantes, de traits sublimes sont perdus et pour lecompositeur et pour la postérité parce que, trop souvent,la pensée dépasse considérablement en vitesse son expres-sion graphique. La notation musicale ordinaire, lente etdéformable, enraye l’intégral enchaînement des impres-sions ou des idées qui souvent, dans leur succession rapide,s’envolent pour ne plus revenir.”26Pedagogically oriented treatises include: E. Coupleux,Sténographie musicale (Paris: Joanin, 1905); AugustinGrosselin, Alphabet sténographique (Lille: Danel, 1870);Gouverneur, Traité complet; Jean-Joseph Mouis, Transpo-sition instantanée, sténographie musicale (Chalon-sur-Saône: the author, 1903); Arthur Somervell, Shorthand forMusic Dictation (London: Curwen & Sons, 1915).27On the concept of media temporalities, see WolfgangErnst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 66–69.

127


neous elements from the system of musicalwriting that they had inherited. Like the MP3or FLAC formats, stenography was a system foreliminating redundant data, a chapter in whatJonathan Sterne has termed the “general his-tory of compression.”28 Unlike more familiarforms of digital compression, however, steno-graphic compression was applied to musicalsounds that were first filtered through a systemof writing. An analysis of the technical assump-tions of stenographic systems will help revealhow stenographers engaged in the nitty-grittywork of evaluating the limitations of conven-tional notation and the strengths of alterna-tives to it. An exposition of three representa-tive examples shows that stenographic systemsboth maintained and supplanted the spatial logicof the modern staff. Ultimately, these examplessuggest that limitations of notational compres-sion did little to quell the stenographers’ exal-tation of unpremeditated inspiration.

In Michel Woldemar’s 1798 Tableau mélo-tachygraphique, the stenographer keeps thequill on the page, tracing the contour of amelody over the staff.29 The result is an arcwhose “corners” denote pitches (plate 2). Acrossthe Tableau, however, Woldemar attempts togo beyond the staff-based system by condens-ing complex or zigzag-prone stenographic fig-ures. Scalar abbreviation, as the proliferatingexamples given (plate 3) suggest, is more com-plicated than it would appear. Woldemar’s com-pressive system makes no modifications to therepresentational system of the staff. Even so,his rudimentary attempts at musical abbrevia-tion spawn ever-more complex compensatory

marks in an effort to clarify the desired execu-tion of the scales.

Prévost’s 1833 Sténographie musicale ou artde suivre l’exécution musicale en écrivant no-tates the intervals that comprise a melody, al-lowing each pitch to be connected with anyother with the same ease.30 The stenographer’shand remains on the page for an entire mea-sure, forming all requisite interval signs into asingle “monogram” (plate 4).31 Prévost’s sys-tem uses the conventional staff, even extend-ing it through the addition of two dotted linesabove and below. “The adoption of this base,”Prévost claims, “will facilitate the study of thisnew art.”32 In Prévost’s hands, however, thestaff acquires two distinct representational uses.First, it serves as a conventional system of ab-solute pitch references—as a way to anchor theinitial pitch of each monogram. Second, Prévostturns the staff’s representational system on itshead, using its lines and space to convey dura-tion instead of pitch.

A third variety of music stenography aban-doned the staff entirely, attempting instead toconvey both pitch and duration through newlyinvented signs. One of the most comprehen-sive systems of this type was developed by theMunich organist August Baumgartner between1839 and 1853.33 In addition to being a profes-sional musician, Baumgartner was a student ofGabelsbergian shorthand, a cursive systembased on Latin longhand characters that hadgained widespread popularity throughout Ger-many by the mid-nineteenth century. Taking a

28Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham:Duke University Press, 2012), 5.29Michel Woldemar, Tableau mélo-tachygraphique (Paris:Cousineau père & fils, [1798]). I date the Tableau based onFétis, “Sur le Langage universel de la musique,” Revuemusicale 1, no. 4 (1828): 270–74.

30Prévost, Sténographie musicale, 19–20. Prévost mentionsWoldemar’s Tableau (p. 3), but by his own acknowledg-ment he knew it only through Fétis’s review cited in n.29.31Prévost, Sténographie musicale, 21.32Prévost, Sténographie musicale, 13.33Joseph Alteneder, Franz Xaver Gabelsberger: Erfinder derdeutschen Stenographie (Munich: Franzscher, 1902), 394.

Plate 2: Woldemar, Tableau mélo-tachygraphique, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

128

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

Woldemar proposes special stenographic notations for scales in octaves or tenths, figures which would otherwise requirethe stenographer to draw zigzags spanning the staff. The notation of the scale-plus-octave unit is closely followed by anumber of further combinations. Each of these variants requires modifications to the basic stenographic notation for ascale.

Plate 3: Woldemar, Tableau mélo-tachygraphique, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

cue from Gabelsberger’s system, Baumgartner’smusic stenography involves both simplifica-tions to notational script and shorthand figuresthat stand for longer musical patterns.34

Baumgartner combines notations of absolutepitch and relative intervals, echoing Prévost’s

earlier attempts. The budding stenographermust practice not only the signs for pitches andintervals, but must be trained in their efficientcombination (plate 5). To convey rhythm, thestenographer varies the thickness and curva-ture of the pen stroke (plate 6). In a furtherattempt to match the rapidity of musical dis-course, a single motion of the pen accounts foreach measure, producing a connected “mono-gram” that is densely packed with notationalinformation.

34He drew on the distinction in Gabelsberger’s system be-tween Schriftkürzung and Schreibkürzung; see Franz XaverGabelsberger, Anleitung zur deutschen Redezeichenkunstoder Stenographie (Munich: Franz, 1850), 11.

129


Plate 4: Hippolyte Prévost, A System of Musical Stenography (London: Cocks, 1849), plate 2.

Each measure is written stenographically using a continuous ink line, forming what Prévost terms a “monogram.” Thebeginning of each monogram occupies the conventional pitch location on the staff, but all subsequent pitches in themonogram are given intervallically: a line indicates a second, horizontal semi-circles stand for thirds, the left-hand side of avertical semi-circle for fourths, and the right-hand side for fifths, all irrespective of where these signs fall on the staff itself.Prévost notates rhythm through the number of lines or spaces on the staff the stenographic sign crosses: three spaces for aquarter note, two for an eighth note, one for a sixteenth note, with special marks for whole and half notes.

Plate 5: Baumgartner, Kurz gefasste Anleitung, plate 5. Pitch names have been added.Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Mus.th. 280, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10598235-9.

This is an excerpt from a two-page-long table that details Baumgartner’s techniques for connecting pitches with intervalsinto a single sign. The table provides combinations of absolute pitch (rows) with ascending intervals (columns). Forexample, the sign in the upper left-hand corner denotes the pitch G followed by the interval of a second (that is, themelodic dyad G–A), the one to its right denotes the pitch G plus an ascending third, and so on.

In the second half of the treatise, Baumgartnersupplies shorthand abbreviations for a plethoraof scalar passages, progressions by both stepand leap, repeated patterns, and inverted ones.As plate 7 reveals, even the simplest musical

patterns lead to considerable notational com-plexities. The symbolic means he marshals tocompress the patterns require ever-increasingdetail to account for all requisite musical pa-rameters. In this light, his disclaimer that this

130

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

Plate 6: Baumgartner, Kurz gefasste Anleitung, plate 2.Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Mus.th. 280, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10598235-9.

This table shows how rhythmic values are written stenographically, displayed across four octaves worth of ascendingconsecutive pitches. The sign in the upper left-hand corner corresponds to a whole-note G, while the sign below it indicatesa half-note G, and so on.

pattern-based notation is “hardly as arbitraryas it may appear at first glance” sounds suspi-ciously like special pleading.35 As Linda Orrhas observed in the parallel realm of speechstenography, systems designed to simplify writ-ing “kept reproducing the shadow of the old[language] in all of its complexity.”36 Similarly,the successful notation of musical patterns thatexceed the most rudimentary repetition or se-quence required detailed symbolic resourcesthat were as difficult to master, write, and re-member as ordinary notation itself.

These attempts raise an important question:if Baumgartner intended to record the mostoriginal and fleeting ideas, then why did hefocus on efficiently notating scales, sequences,and musical patterns that are far more formu-

laic than novel? Clues may be found inBaumgartner’s own aesthetic principles. “A pe-culiarity of music [Tonsprache],” he writes, is“that it repeats itself”: “it presents repetitionin the most varied alterations, and searches inthis manner to join unity with variety, so thatwithout fatiguing, one can dwell longer on thebasic idea.”37 Musical repetition that reducestoo easily to a single “basic idea,” is less desir-able than a process of iteration that leads to“unity with variety,” Baumgartner suggests.One may extrapolate from his belief that com-pression on the level of musical pattern is arisky endeavor: by rendering too much musicaldetail as the product of a simple algorithm, onecould eliminate precisely the subtle variants

35Baumgartner, Kurz gefasste Anleitung, 28 (“keineswegsso willkürlich ist, als sie allerdings auf den ersten Anblickerscheinen dürfte”).36Linda Orr, “The Blind Spot of History: Logography,” YaleFrench Studies 73 (1987): 190–214, here 210.

37Baumgartner, Kurz gefasste Anleitung, 17: “EineEigenthümlichkeit der Tonsprache ist aber, dass sie sichin Wiederholungen gefällt. . . . sie gibt die Wiederholungin den mannigfaltigsten Veränderungen, und sucht dadurchEinheit mit Mannigfaltigkeit zu verbinden, um so ohne zuermüden, länger beim Grundgedanken verweilen zukönnen.”

131


from which musical interest derives in the firstplace.

Baumgartner’s examples reveal how pattern-based compression could expose an unsophisti-cated framework buried beneath complex mu-sical passagework. As shown in plate 8,Baumgartner’s stenography allows him to no-tate Rodolphe Kreutzer’s third étude from theÉtudes (1796) as five repeated patterns. By re-ducing the 257-note étude to a half-line of steno-graphic symbols, Baumgartner provides a suc-cessful example of lossless compression of mu-sical patterns: his signs supply sufficient infor-mation to reconstruct the étude in its entirety.Baumgartner’s stenography reveals that theétude is built from a mere handful of patternsand transpositions. Perhaps in so doing, it alsoreveals a straightforward correspondence be-tween the étude’s “basic idea” and its musicalsurface. By privileging the textual encoding ofpatterns, however, Baumgartner does not ac-knowledge that the étude’s repetitive pitchstructure provides an armature on which theviolinist may practice the twenty bowing pat-terns given in the previous étude, nor does heconsider how the performer could imbue such

patterns with coherence in the course of perfor-mance.38 In short, he overlooks nontextualmeans of joining “unity with variety.”

Baumgartner’s fascination with pattern-gen-erated musical utterance resonated with con-temporaneous practice and pedagogy. As JimSamson notes, the “demand for constant spon-taneity” among even the greatest virtuosi “ul-timately promotes the formula, and at the sametime elevates the idiomatic, the capacity to‘think with the fingers.’”39 Not only the terri-tory of virtuosi, the mastery and deployment ofsuch idiomatic figures were central to musicaltraining. As Leslie Blasius argues, the prepon-derance of musical figures in pianoforte trea-tises from the turn-of-the-nineteenth-centuryParis conservatory environment derived frombeliefs about the close connection betweenbodily sensation and musical sound, as studiesencouraged musicians to decompose and re-

38For the background of such new virtuosity, see OwenJander, “The ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata as Dialogue,” Early Music16/1 (1988): 34–49, here 36–38.39Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Tran-scendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2003), 46.

Plate 7: Baumgartner, Kurz gefasste Anleitung, plate 14.Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Mus.th. 280, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10598235-9.

In Baumgartner’s treatise, five pages of lithographed examples are dedicated to demonstrating pattern-based abbreviation.Here, in one of the more straightforward examples, Baumgartner proposes a technique for notating three-pitch figures inwhich the first and last pitches are the same. The location of the dash or comma in relation to the main symbol indicatesboth the interval between the first and second pitch and whether this interval is ascending or descending.

132

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

Plate 8: Baumgartner, Kurz gefasste Anleitung, plate 13. Brackets and numbers have been addedto clarify the correspondence between passages in staff notation and the stenographic signs.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Mus.th. 280, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10598235-9.

Baumgartner’s stenography is highly efficient at compressing patterns that are formed by the repetition of intervallicpatterns in transposition. The bulk of this étude consists of three such intervallic patterns, corresponding to the passagesand signs labeled 1, 2, and 3.

133


construct bodily sensations.40 In short, Baum-gartner’s stenography attempted to capture pat-terns that musicians knew as embodied musi-cal gestures.

Insecurities concerning original and deriva-tive pattern-based musical thought were espe-cially apparent in discussions around improvi-sation. A rather extreme example of the elisionof patterns into purported originality is offeredby Dietrich Nicolaus Winkel’s 1821 Com-ponium, an orchestrion that could “improvise”by randomly combining short, pre-composedmusical segments. Capable of generating over14,500 quintillion unique variations, the ma-chine could sate a desire for the new and origi-nal through a seemingly boundless, mechani-cally generated combinatoriality.41 A similartechnical logic, albeit scaled to a human level,undergirded improvisation treatises by FrédéricKalkbrenner and Carl Czerny. Kalkbrennerhoped to instruct aspiring pianists by demys-tifying improvisation, in the process promot-ing greater circulation of pattern-based tech-niques.42 He urged the aspiring improviser tomaster short progressions, to “learn to developthem” using figuration patterns, and finally“enchain them one after another.”43 To illus-

trate this process, Kalkbrenner supplies seven-teen variants on a basic progression, notingthat “it is impossible to exhaust such a fertiledeposit; each individual will see new combina-tions in it.”44

Perhaps Baumgartner believed that patternswere the raw materials of original thoughts.But perhaps he was also suspicious of theirpreponderance. By efficiently notating patterns,Baumgartner’s stenography could help to un-mask the formulaic skeletons of musical ideas.At the same time, the stenography could helpthe composer see which ideas are not formu-laic, since these would be more difficult tonotate through the pattern-based stenography.When ideas are birthed through the aid of steno-graphic notation, the composer could disciplinenascent inspiration, isolating novel ideas fromthose infected by quotidian musical formulae.Such a use of stenographic inscription wouldresemble that feared by poetic improvisers,whose seemingly improvised verses could beexposed as mere memorization by the carefulscribe.45 What is more, by divorcing such musi-cal patterns from their embodied guises in animproviser’s repertoire and instead treatingthem as dry textual patterns, Baumgartner’sstenography expunges musical ideas whose co-herence derives primarily from the performer’sbody. Such sieving of inadvertently rememberedmusical gesture must have been particularlypowerful since virtuosic performance dependednot only on the extensive use of such formulae,but also on their masterful concealment underthe hands of Paganini, Kreutzer, or Liszt.46

40Leslie Blasius, “The Mechanics of Sensation and the Con-struction of the Romantic Musical Experience,” in MusicTheory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–24, here 17.41On the elision of the aleatoric into the improvisatory:Roger Moseley, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Mediumfrom Apollo to Nintendo (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 2016), 127–67. On the Componium: PhilippeJohn Van Tiggelen, Componium: The Mechanical MusicalImprovisor (Louvain-La-Neuve: Institut Superieurd’Archeologie et d’Histoire de l’Art College Erasme, 1987);David Trippett, Wagner’s Melodies: Aesthetics and Mate-rialism in German Musical Identity (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2013), 96–98.42Frédéric Kalkbrenner, Traité d’harmonie du pianiste:principes rationnels de la modulation pour apprendre àpréluder et à improviser (Paris: the author, 1849), 1.Kalkbrenner writes that his treatise lifts “un coin de cevoile, qui recouvre la partie technique de la musique et larend presque incompréhensible à tous ceux qui n’y sontpas profondément initiés.”43Kalkbrenner, Traité d’harmonie, 40. Carl Czerny, A Sys-tematic Introduction to Improvisation on the Pianoforte:Opus 200, trans. Alice L. Mitchell (New York: Longman,1983), 5–11; for summaries of similar combinatorial pre-luding treatises, see Thomas Meyer, “Über das Verfertigenvon Präludien: eine Gebrauchskunst zwischen Kompositionund Improvisation,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 160/4(1999): 24–29.

44Kalkbrenner, Traité d’harmonie, 16: “il est impossibled’épuiser une mine aussi féconde; chaque individu y verrade nouvelles combinaisons.”45Melina Esse, “Encountering the improvvisatrice in Ital-ian Opera,” Journal of the American Musicological Soci-ety 66/3 (2013): 709–70, here 758; Michael Caesar, “PoeticImprovisation and the Challenge of Transcription,” in The-atre, Opera, and Performance in Italy from the FifteenthCentury to the Present: Essays in Honour of RichardAndrews, ed. Brian Richardson, Simon Gilson, andCatherine Keen (Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 2004),173–84, here 178.46Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, 35–36; DavidTrippett, “Après une Lecture de Liszt: Virtuosity andWerktreue in the ‘Dante’ Sonata,” this journal 32/1 (2008):52–93; Dana Gooley, “Schumann and Agencies of Impro-visation,” in Rethinking Schumann, ed. Roe-Min Kok andLaura Tunbridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),129–56.

134

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

To the naked eye, music stenography’s ec-centric squiggles appear to fundamentally re-ject contemporary music notation. In fact, how-ever, Woldemar, Prévost, and Baumgartner vo-raciously recycled graphic elements from thestaff. What is more, they prioritized the samemusical parameters as the staff—pitch, dura-tion, and a concern for the linear, note-to-noteconstruction of a musical idea. As the platesshow, treatises abound with side-by-side com-parisons of stenography and staff notation, sug-gesting a concrete sense in which both authorsand readers evaluated these new systems inaccordance with the standards offered by thestaff itself. The ubiquity of the musical staffsurfaces not only in the mutual affinities be-tween these inscriptive systems, but also intheir subcutaneous technical logics. As a grid-like system for conveying discrete pitches, thestaff allows any pitch to be followed by anyother with considerable ease. Stenographic sys-tems that abandoned this principle by attempt-ing to capture large-scale patterns invented adizzying array of symbols to do so. The sup-posed clarity of pattern-based paraphrase waslittle better than the idiosyncratic complexi-ties of conventional notation. Yet even so, byexploring the boundaries of successful inscrip-tion, these music stenographies brought intofocus the perpetually hazy horizon that sepa-rates inscribable musical qualities from thosethat resist transduction into textual form.

Uncapturable Sound

Why do stenographic treatises consistentlypraise contingent sounds and believe that thosemost likely to disappear are among the mostdesirable? Few stenographers addressed thisseemingly fundamental question directly, in-stead assuming that their projects met a self-evident need. One of the few stenographers towrite at length and in detail about the compo-sitional process, and hence a main source forunderstanding the wider patterns of techno-logical thought that informed music stenogra-phy, was Michel Eisenmenger. His 1838 Traitésur l’art graphique et la mécanique appliquésà la musique suggests that musical ephemeral-ity as an aesthetic ideal gained force throughits opposition to both inscription and musical

memory.47 Eisenmenger’s treatise offers threerelated innovations: first, he proposes a newstaff, one directly based on the morphology ofthe keyboard itself; second, he outlines a musicstenography derived from his keyboard staff;and finally, he proposes a special keyboard at-tachment capable of notating a performance(plate 9).

Eisenmenger’s inventions would help thecomposer capture inspirations, which he un-derstands as powerful forces that override thecomposer’s conscious will. When “inspirationtakes hold of him,” Eisenmenger writes, “thesemoments of verve and inspiration cannot becontrolled.” A “rapid melody” crosses “his mindlike a flash”: “how many ideas strike at anyhour on the door of his genius and disappearlike imps!”48 In this confounding light,Eisenmenger’s depiction of the frustration at-tending the labor of composition is telling:

[The composer’s] head is nothing more than a vastconcert hall, which resounds with a mysterious mu-sic that he hears as well as if he were listening toreal music. . . . After having found . . . the idea thatsuits him, his only concern is the manner of render-ing this idea. It appears to him first only as a whole,because he is too heated with excitement to analyzeit; so he tries to reproduce it on his instrument. . . .Thus he distinguishes the sounds that follow oneanother and the sounds that are heard simulta-neously; thus he sees the character of the rhythmand the meter, the nature of the scale and mode;thus he begins to represent each sound individually,according to its pitch, its rhythm, its meter, its beat,its scale, its mode, its key.49

47Michel Eisenmenger, Traité sur l’art graphique et lamécanique appliqués à la musique (Paris: Gosselin, 1838).48Eisenmenger, Traité, 30–34.49Eisenmenger, Traité, 35–36: “Sa tête [the composer’s] n’estplus qu’une vaste salle de concerts, qui retentit d’unemusique mystérieuse, qu’il entend aussi bien que s’ilécoutait une musique réelle. . . . Après avoir . . . trouvél’idée qui lui convient, il ne s’occupe plus que de la manièrede la rendre. Cette idée ne lui apparaît d’abord qu’en bloc,car il a trop de fièvre pour l’analyser; il essaie alors de lareproduire sur son instrument. . . . c’est alors qu’il distingueles sons qui se succèdent et les sons qui se font entendresimultanément et qui constituent l’harmonie; c’est alorsqu’il voit le caractère du rhythme et de la mesure, la na-ture de la gamme et du mode; c’est alors qu’il se met àreprésenter chaque son à part et l’un après l’autre, selon savaleur, selon son intonation, selon son rhythme, selon samesure, selon son temps, selon sa gamme, selon son mode,selon sa clef.”

135


The composer is acted upon by musical ideas.Since Eisenmenger portrays the composer as atormented transcriber of thoughts, it isunsurprising that he would be drawn to steno-graphic inscription: much like the speech ste-nographer—who dutifully records others’ voicesin order to project them to a readership—thecomposer’s ideas, once captured, will be per-formed by others elsewhere.

In Eisenmenger’s view, the composer facesthese difficulties because imagined and writtensounds are separated from one another by anearly unbridgeable chasm. When the arduousprocess of analyzing the inspiration into itscomponent parts is finally complete and thecomposer “has notated the first idea, he mustbegin to work again, regain his outburst, hispassion, his delirium, become impassionedagain only to fall one instant later into thelabyrinth of sounds and their signs, from whichhe will leave only with a cold soul and impa-tient mind.”50

This incongruity between imagined soundand written symbols finds parallels in Kittler’saccount of nineteenth-century means of spa-tially storing time-dependent data. “Texts andscores,” Kittler notes, “are based on a writingsystem whose time is (in Lacan’s term) sym-bolic.” Yet sound, noise, and—we would addbased on Eisenmenger’s description—musical

inspirations do not come pre-packaged into sym-bolic units. In order to be processed and stored,such phenomena first “had to pass through thebottleneck of the signifier.”51 The stenographers’attempts to use symbolic systems of writing tomatch music’s real-time unfolding may seemprescient, foreshadowing how film and me-chanical sound recording could replicate, re-arrange, and invert temporal orders. Stenogra-phers, however, consistently deployed symbolicsystems of writing, never escaping the “bottle-neck of the signifier.”

Although Kittler identifies alphabetic writ-ing and music notation as analogous forms ofsymbolic inscription, in Eisenmenger’s viewdifferences between the two cemented the ur-gency of developing music stenography: “[withspeech] thought can stop, and the idea is inter-rupted without inconvenience. Each phrasegives a complete meaning, which remainsreadily present to the memory while one writesit down; and on the basis of which one can atleisure work out the phrase that should fol-low.”52 In Eisenmenger’s view, the representa-tional nature of language facilitated its tran-scription, since semantic content could serveas a mnemonic crutch. In music, conversely,

the idea is so immaterial, each note is so indepen-dent from that which precedes it and that which

50Eisenmenger, Traité, 36: “il est parvenu ainsi à fixer unepremière idée, il faut qu’il se remette à l’œuvre, reprennel’élan, de la chaleur, du délire, se passionne de nouveaupour retomber un instant après dans ce labyrinthe dessons et de leurs signes, dont il ne sortira chaque fois quel’âme froide et l’esprit impatienté.”

51Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 4.52Eisenmenger, Traité, 14: “la réflexion peut s’arrêter, et lapensée être brisée sans inconvénient, car chaque phrasedonne un sens complet, qui reste facilement présent à lamémoire pendant qu’on l’écrit; et sur lequel on peut àloisir calculer le phrase qui doit suivre.”

Plate 9: Eisenmenger, Traité, plate C. Eisenmenger’s music stenography.

136

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

follows it and the conceptions are born and succeedeach other in such a rapid manner, that once inspira-tion arrives, it overflows like a torrent, pours outideas on top of ideas, and does not leave any time forthought. But as soon as one wishes to grab ahold ofan idea, everything stops, the outburst is broken assoon as thought begins to oppose it: one can barelysave a single idea from the upset, and it is only littleby little that the imagination regains its flight.53

Eisenmenger offers a typical paean to music’sRomantic ephemerality, as his rhetoric distin-guishes between the coldness of rational,speech-based invention and the impassionedfervor of musical inspiration. In repeating thistrope, he draws connections between the weak-ness of human memory and musical fragility.In normal speech, he believes, an underlyingsense of the phrase’s entire meaning allows thespeaker to pause, assured that a complete for-mulation of the thought will naturally follow.In music, by comparison, there is no equiva-lent to such semantic content. Rather, the mu-sical idea’s “meaning” consists exclusively inthe precise manner that its pitches and rhythmsunfold, whether in the concert hall or in thecomposer’s imagination. Failure to match itsspeed produces confusion and frustration; thepauses that speech allows would upend theflow of musical inspiration. As a result, thinksEisenmenger, the composer must follow thenascent inspiration in real time with virtuallyno assistance from mental paraphrase or sum-mary. This formulation further suggests thatimagined music’s ephemeral state is height-ened due to the composer’s own inadequatemeans of preserving the imagined musicalthought via memory or inscription.

In expressing the difficulty of processing tem-poral sequences in symbolic units, Eisenmengerseems sympathetic to Kittler’s observation thatthe mind alone has difficulty retaining, repeat-

ing, and manipulating real-time temporal phe-nomena.54 Although Woldemar and Baum-gartner stumbled upon the difficulty of con-densing complex musical patterns into efficientparaphrases, Eisenmenger connected this prob-lem with music’s temporality. If paraphrasecannot subvert music’s temporal linearity, thenstenography could match it by following music’sreal-time progression. In this sense, Eisenmen-ger employed stenography as a form of exter-nalized musical memory, exporting one com-ponent of compositional labor to a technicalsystem.

To close the fissure between the musicalidea and its inscription, Eisenmenger searchedfor a means of writing music “without think-ing about the writing itself,” just as one writesspeech without thinking of its mechanics.55 Inconceiving of writing as a transparent vehiclefor thought that precedes it, Eisenmenger’saspirations align with the systematic prioritiza-tion of orality over writing that Jacques Derridafamously construed as a dominant paradigm ofWestern culture.56 Yet music stenographerswere unable to consummate their logocentricdesires. Eisenmenger supplanted his steno-graphic system with an indexical means of re-cording the impact of piano keys on a sheet ofpaper, allowing the keyboard’s interface to takethe place of unmediated composerly writing(plate 10), while Prévost in later life consideredhis earlier efforts a “utopian folly” and an actof “downright impiety.”57 For others, the pre-requisite for stenographic writing was a reduc-tion of musical ideas to homophonic texture,or even to a melody alone.58

53Eisenmenger, Traité, 14–15: “la pensée est si immatérielle,chaque note est si indépendante de celle qui la précède etde celle qui la suit, les conceptions naissent et se succèdentd’une manière si rapide, qu’une fois l’inspiration arrivée,elle déborde comme un torrent, verse idées sur idées, et nelaisse plus de temps à la réflexion; mais dès qu’on veuts’emparer d’une idée, tout s’arrête, l’élan est brisé dès quela réflexion vient se mettre en travers; à peine l’on peutsauver une seule idée de la secousse, et ce n’est que petit àpetit que l’imagination reprend son essor.”

54Sybille Krämer, “The Cultural Techniques of Time AxisManipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Me-dia,” Theory, Culture & Society 23/7–8 (2006): 93–109,here 96.55Eisenmenger, Traité, 37: “permit d’écrire la musiquecomme on écrit le discours, c’est-à-dire sans penser àl’écriture même.”56Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 6–7 and42–44.57Prévost, “A Visit to Rossini,” 839. The German publica-tion of Prévost’s treatise likewise failed to meet criticalexpectations: “Recensionen,” Allgemeine musikalischeZeitung 36, no. 18 (1834): 285–87.58Prévost, Stains, Baumgartner, and Raab recognized theneed for a notation of harmony, but only Stains and Raabmade substantial proposals in this regard. Baumgartner

137


Probing the limits of what could be musi-cally inscribed, stenographers distinguished theaspects of music that were preservable fromthose that were not. The power of this concep-tual delineation was as striking as it was simple.It allowed qualities that eluded inscription’ssymbolic order to be bracketed as noninscrib-able, a precise function that stood in stark con-trast to the seemingly vague adjectives thatstenographers employed. The theory of com-pression (discussed in Stenographic Techniquesabove) assumes that a stable input is beingcompressed. This assumption falls apart whencompression is applied not to a definable datasource, but to inchoate ideas spewing from themind. In claiming to capture these ideas, ste-nography constructed the object it sought torecord, valorizing that which it could not pre-serve through its very attempt to do so. The

music-stenographic project was in this senseimpossible: to fully transcribe inspirations intheir fleeting richness would have underminedthe opposition between the inscribable and thenoninscribable that justified such attempts inthe first place.

Speech Stenography and Print Media

So far, my observations have suggested ten-sions between the technical procedures ofstenographies and their aspirations. Althoughthis technical account sheds light on the aes-thetic values that stenographers endorsed, itdoes not yet explain how music stenographycould persist for nearly two centuries despitenever leaving the outskirts of musical culture.To elucidate music stenography as a culturalphenomenon, I here shift perspective from thestenographic treatises themselves to the broadertechnological landscape of their day. The ste-nographers’ obstinate claims to be concernedwith the compositional process are misleading.After questioning the coherence of the com-poser-centric world they present, I show thatilluminating parallels may be drawn to com-mon views about speech stenography and espe-

evidently intended to publish a second volume concerningthe stenographic notation of harmony, but died of a headinjury before he could complete it. Some brief mention ofhow to notate harmony is made in his KurzgefaßteGeschichte der musikalischen Notation. Most musicstenographies, however, assume that musical ideas are me-lodic.

Plate 10: Eisenmenger, Traité, plate D.A keyboard-based system for notating a musical performance.

138

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

cially its promise to revolutionize modern so-ciety. When seen as adaptations of speech ste-nography, music stenography appears as both areflection of, and window into, the print cul-ture of its time.

Few composers conceived or deployed steno-graphic methods. To be sure, some composerssketched with a rapidity similar to that of steno-graphic writing. Beethoven encouraged the Arch-duke Rudolph to “immediately [write] downthose fleeting inspirations that may come toyou”: in doing so, “not only is the imaginationstrengthened, but also one learns how to in-stantly secure the most remote ideas.”59 Unlikemost composers, music stenographers soughtformalized and systematic resolutions to theproblems posed by the rapidity of musical inspi-ration. In addition, stenographers’ preoccupa-tions are curiously out of touch with the nitty-gritty aspects of composition. There are no dis-cussions of revision, instrumentation, publica-tion, or even performance needs. Stenographictreatises are not written in the first-person voiceof a composer, but rather in that of an abstract,third person offering a service for composers’use. The disconnect between the treatises’ claimsto aid the needy composer and their schematic,highly idealized descriptions of compositionallabor casts doubt on the stenographers’ insightinto the compositional process.

Stenographers’ concrete musical discussionssuggest a further level of ignorance. By the earlynineteenth century, composers had developeda conventionalized language to signal inspired,real-time musical thought in written form.When included in compositions, unexpectedmodulations, rapid shifts in topic, and free-wheeling arpeggios could evoke values associ-ated with improvisation, and by extension, asense of spontaneity and musical fecundity.60

Although stenographers and composers alikeattempted to translate spontaneous utterancesinto textual form, the musical examples in-cluded in stenographic treatises are curiouslybarren of improvisatory tropes, focusing insteadon études, popular tunes, and occasionally ex-cerpts from well-known compositions. What ismore, no stenographer considered the thornychallenges arising from notating hallmarks ofimprovisation, such as rhythmic freedom, un-conventional harmonic motion, or complex idi-omatic textures. Music stenographers not onlymade promises they could not uphold, butseemed unaware of what they were promisingin the first place.

Neither are stenographic treatises convinc-ingly pitched to the aspiring composer or ama-teur, despite occasional marketing toward “dil-ettantes.”61 Few music stenographers discussthe fact that their systems require a highlydeveloped ear. The treatises assume that thestenographer can instantaneously parse melo-dies into intervallic content while also catch-ing a melody’s rhythmic profile. Although theseskills are common among highly trained musi-cians, stenographers rarely consider this pre-requisite or the substantial investment of time,training, and professionalism it requires. De-tailed explanations of how to train the hand inproducing new symbols are rarely matched bydiscussions of training the ear.62 Yet for manyaspiring music stenographers, an under-devel-oped sense of musical hearing would have been

59Beethoven to the Archduke Rudolph, Vienna, 1 June 1823.Quoted in Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essayin Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2006), 277–78. On Beethoven’s sketching process,Barry Cooper, Beethoven and the Creative Process (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1990), 81–82 and 93–103.60James Webster, “The Rhetoric of Improvisation inHaydn’s Keyboard Music,” in Haydn and the Performanceof Rhetoric, ed. Tom Beghin and Sander Goldberg (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 172–212, esp.208–9. On the rise of improvisatory rhetoric in nineteenth-century instrumental music, see Peter Schleuning, The

Fantasia, trans. A. C. Howie (Cologne: A. Volk Verlag,1971), 14–18.61Baumgartner, Kurz gefasste Anleitung, 1; Prévost,Sténographie musicale, 2. Prévost advertised courses inmusic stenography to take place in the Galerie Vivienne,and they were marketed especially to women: “Prospec-tus: Cours de sténographie musicale,” Revue musicale 7,no. 9 (1833): 71.62Baumgartner, Kurz gefasste Anleitung, 35–38. Adalbertde Rambures’s stenography is an intriguing exception tothis claim. Rambures believed that a stenographic nota-tion could facilitate the early stages of musical instruc-tion, thus echoing notation reformers’ calls for a moreaccessible system of reading. Once the students had gradu-ated to use of conventional notation, they would retainthe stenographic system for recording new musical ideas.Eager to expand musical literacy, Rambures evidently testedhis ideas on the inhabitants of Vaudricourt, a small townin northern France. See Adalbert de Rambures, Sténographiemusicale (Abbeville: Paillart, 1843).

139


the greatest barrier to capturing musicalthoughts in real time.

By addressing neither the demands of sea-soned composers nor the needs of aspiring mu-sicians, music stenographies were more or lessdead on arrival. Their lengthy persistence inthe margins of musical culture cannot be ex-plained as a felicitous response to a real need.What led so many tinkerers to enthusiastically(and largely independently) stumble into thesame dead end? Why would improvements tothe technical expedients of composition fasci-nate non-composers? Answering these ques-tions requires a shift in perspective from thatof the stenographic treatises themselves to thewider technological and medial landscape ofthe day. For however marginal music stenogra-phy remained, its speech analog was extremelypopular and widely practiced into the twenti-eth century. Taking into account this contextreveals that music stenography’s serial rein-ventions are more accurately viewed as adapta-tions of speech stenography into a musical do-main. Seen in this light, the question of itspersistence can be reframed: what did musicstenographers believe speech stenography hadaccomplished, and why did they believe thatthe creation of musical texts would be aided bya similar technology?

The roots of stenography may be traced tothe secretarial culture of the Roman Empireand to Tironian notes, a system of abbrevia-tions through which Cicero’s secretary recordedhis master’s speeches and correspondence.63 Bythe late nineteenth century, however,stenography’s origins in a scribal elite werelong vanished, replaced by its widespread andeveryday application. Stenography proliferatedthrough a ricochet of adaptations, as systemswere translated between English, French, Ger-man, Italian, and so on, while individual ste-nographers improved old systems and severaldeveloped their own.64 Special associations wereformed to help in its propagation, lavish inter-national congresses debated its finer points, and

its advocates built their own hagiographies offorebearers and innovators. By the turn of thetwentieth century, over twenty cities had streetsnamed after Franz Xaver Gabelsberger, a lead-ing German stenographer (and Baumgartner’sinspiration).65 As late as 1971, McGraw-Hillpublished a practical textbook on the subject.66As a technical craft, stenography required con-siderable training. Yet it could be learnedthrough correspondence courses and masteredthrough assiduous independent study.67 Thou-sands of novices were drawn to stenography’sself-taught ethos, close alignment with narra-tives of societal progress, and promises of fi-nancial betterment.68

While stenography could help facilitate com-mercial or personal record keeping, the prestigeaccorded to real-time recording derived largelyfrom its use in law and in politics. Stenography’spopularization across the nineteenth centuryfollowed in the footsteps of democratic reform,whether in July Monarchy France, or in Ger-man lands, where Gabelsberger’s first forayswere inspired by the 1818 constitution in Ba-varia and by its new, bicameral parliament.69By 1877, legislative debates in the United States,Canada, India, and across Europe were recordedby teams of stenographers, who would work inshifts to transcribe and check one another’swork for verbatim accuracy.70 So too, was itsforce felt in public life—at least for the Earl of

63H. C. Teitler, Notarii and Exceptores: An Inquiry intoRole [sic] and Significance of Shorthand Writers in theImperial and Ecclesiastical Bureaucracy of the RomanEmpire (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1985).64H. Glatte, Shorthand Systems of the World (New York:Philosophical Library, 1959), 23–31.

65Albert Navarre, Histoire générale de la sténographie &de l’écriture à travers les âges (Paris: Delagrave, 1905),455.66John Robert Gregg, Louis A. Leslie, and Charles E.Zoubek, Gregg Shorthand (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).67Henry Pitman, Hints on Lecturing and Notes on theHistory of Shorthand (London: F. Pitman, 1879), 99–100.68To give some idea of the scale, there were 16,449 pupilsat 608 establishments receiving lessons from 779 instruc-tors in Gabelsbergian shorthand for the years 1874–75.Thomas Anderson, History of Shorthand with a Review ofits Present Condition and Prospects in Europe and America(London: Allen, 1882), 184–85.69France: Orr, “The Blind Spot of History”; Bavaria: Navarre,Histoire générale de la sténographie, 456; United States:Gitelman, Scripts, 44–45. In the United Kingdom, theHouse of Commons had first allowed reporters in 1802,but until 1871 it was possible for these to be expelled atthe will of an MP. Transactions of the First InternationalShorthand Congress (London: Pitman, 1888), 7, 24.70For a comparative overview of these practices, see Trans-actions of the First International Shorthand Congress, 40–60. Although in the 1830s one or two stenographers werecharged with recording French parliamentary debates by

140

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

Rosebery (and future Prime Minister)—who sawstenographers as a “tremendous tribunal beforewhich every public speaker has to appear, whosharpen their pencils as if they were poniards,and whose record there is no angel whatever toblot out with a tear.”71

The distinct national chronologies for thepropagation of speech stenography were uni-fied by an underlying increase in demand forprint media and a growing concern for the newand newsworthy. As Jürgen Habermas has fa-mously argued, a bolstered density of trade re-lations and the formation of a public spherewere supported by the rapid circulation of in-formation, placing added weight on print as amedium for public opinion.72 For BenedictAnderson, the proliferation of “print capital-ism” built novel commonalities of experienceamong those separated by geographic distance,a paradoxically impersonal communityundergirded in no small part by the unceasingcirculation of newspapers.73 As parliamentaryrecorders and newspaper reporters, stenogra-phers were closely allied with these develop-ments. In addition, stenography capitalized onemerging shifts in temporal experience, inwhich the past became distinctly other and thefuture promised unrealized potential. AsReinhart Koselleck observes, this era was “im-pregnated with the difference which was tornopen between one’s own time and that of thefuture, between previous experience and theexpectations of what was to come.”74 Thus,membership in the political public expanded at

the same moment that this community seemedto be progressing toward an open-ended moder-nity; print technologies promised to coordinateand inform against the background of expand-ing physical and temporal distances.

Stenography played a crucial, if often invis-ible, role in this print culture. Capturing speechin real-time could promise to bring concretestatements and acts into wide and immediatecirculation. While printing provided the arma-ture for distribution, stenography enabled printto encompass real-time speech. In the self-ag-grandizing view of the English stenographer SirIsaac Pitman (1813–97, knighted in 1894), ste-nography was nothing less than the guarantorof modern democracy: “Speaking in a generalway, without Stenography, there would be noreporters—without reporters, no newspapers—without newspapers, no readers—and withoutreaders, England would be thrown back two orthree centuries in the march of civilization.”75In this slippery-slope argument, England’s na-tional power was indebted not only to the cir-culation of newspapers, but ultimately to theability of reporters to notate words and ideason the fly. Real-time documentation was thefirst link in this chain of mediations, capturingevents as they unfolded. Stenography converted“non-discursive reality” into “discourse.”76 Inso doing, however, the stenographer alwaysserved a wider audience; he, in the words of theEarl of Rosebery, “appears as the visible con-science of the public man.”77 To be sure, aconcern for permanence also drove stenographicefforts, which could afford transient speech alasting place in the printed record. But steno-graphy’s greatest promise was to more fullyenable textual dissemination, and thus to helpthe public sphere to better understand and scru-tinize the workings of politics. Thanks to ste-nography, printing could relay momentarywords and fleeting acts to an impersonal read-

the 1840s, the task was accomplished by two teams. Thefirst team worked in two-minute shifts to transcribe de-bates, while the second team simultaneously recordedlonger segments; these two records were cross-checkedwith one another, converted to type, and published in theMoniteur universal. “Rapport présenté par M. Ducos,” inL. P. Guénin, Recherches sur l’histoire, la pratique, etl’enseignement de la sténographie (Paris: Delagrave, 1880),97–109.71Transactions of the First International Shorthand Con-gress, 1.72Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of thePublic Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of BourgeoisSociety, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1989 [1962]), 16–26, 30–31.73Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflectionson the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. (Lon-don: Verso, 2006), 35.74Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics ofHistorical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2004), 241; Peter Fritzsche, Stranded inthe Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Ander-son, Imagined Communities, 22–27.75Pitman, Stenographic Sound-Hand (London: SamuelBagster [1837]), 1.76Orr, “The Blind Spot of History,” 209.77Transactions of the First International Shorthand Con-gress, 7.

141


ership, promising dispersed citizens some mea-sure of democratic accountability.

Prévost’s career reflects stenography’s rapidrise in social prestige and newfound proximityto power. Born in 1808, Prévost and his familysuffered financial setbacks that led him to studymathematics with the aim of entering the navy.During these studies, he first encounteredThéodore-Pierre Bertin’s stenographic methodand soon improved it. In 1825 he started teach-ing lucrative courses in his own stenographicsystem, which he soon published. In 1828 hebegan his career as a parliamentary stenogra-pher, first with the Messager des chambres,the following year with Temps, and in 1830,with the Moniteur universel, which reproducedparliamentary debates with rigorous exactitude.In 1843 Prévost was decorated as a Knight ofthe Legion of Honor and from 1848 he was agovernment functionary.78 His system outlivedhim, becoming the basis of the popular Prévost-Delaunay stenography. He was also a frequentmusic critic and amateur violinist.79 ThusPrévost developed his music stenography at arelatively early point in a career spent at thecutting-edge of textual technologies and theirsuccessful application to the political stage.

Music stenographers explicitly justified theirefforts by drawing parallels between speech andmusic. Some treatises, such as Holdsworth andAldridge’s 1768 Natural Short-Hand, rehashedancient analogies between music and language—in this case, by confining music stenography toan appendix devoted to “inarticulate sounds.”80For others, however, the commonalities be-tween speech and music were distinctly mod-ern. For E. T. T. Vidal, printing and writing hadled to marked advances in knowledge, but mu-sic had yet to profit fully from the transforma-tions in print circulation.81 Eisenmenger like-wise believed that music was missing out onthe progress brought about by textual technolo-

gies, noting that thanks to the formidable com-bination of alphabetic writing and the printingpress “thought” could “multiply in a marvel-ous manner, and that, traversing—as if inflight—kingdoms, rivers, and oceans, it speaksat once to all the nations and is conserved forall time.”82 Of course, conventional notationhad accompanied music into the era of printand bred its own resonances.83 Yet, Vidal andEisenmenger imply that conventional notationlimited the scope of musical information enter-ing print. The vague promise of music stenog-raphy was to chip away at the constrictionsblocking the entry of more original ideas intocirculation and, hence, realize the full potentialof the textual revolution in music.84

Nor was it only music stenographers whosaw their inventions through narratives of un-checked progress brought about by writing it-self. For one critic writing in the Allgemeinemusikalische Zeitung in advance of the Ger-man publication of Prévost’s treatise, musicstenography conjured dreams of musicalprogress: “Many Parisian artists have realizedthat stenography will cause a complete revolu-tion in music. We also believe this. What bril-liant works will we receive then, that other-wise died in the inkwell because of slow nota-tion!”85

78René Havette, Bibliographie de la sténographie française(Paris: Dorbon-aîné, 1906), 161–63. Navarre, Histoiregénérale de la sténographie, 240–41.79Havette, Bibliographie, 162. He used the pseudonyms G.Crocius and Paul Kolbert.80William Holdsworth and William Aldridge, Natural Short-Hand (London: the authors, 1768), 71–78.81E. T. T. Vidal, Système de musique sténographique(Toulon: Baume, 1834), 2–7.

82Eisenmenger, Traité, 11: “elle [la pensée] se multiplied’une manière merveilleuse, et que, traversant comme auvol les royaumes, les fleuves, et les mers, elle parle à lafois à toutes les nations, et se conserve pour tous les âges.”83James Davies, “Julia’s Gift: The Social Life of Scores,”Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131/2 (2006):287–309; Emily H. Green, “Memoirs of a Musical Object,Supposedly Written by Itself: It-Narrative and Eighteenth-Century Marketing,” Current Musicology 95 (2013): 193–213.84It was less common for speech stenographies to noteparallels to music. However, in a reversal of the dominanttechnological flow, Auguste Bertini’s Stigmatographie, oul’art d’écrire avec des points (Paris: Martinet, [1812]) usesthe five-line staff to phonetically notate the French lan-guage. Isaac Pitman, a lifelong advocate of phonetic spell-ing reform, was also attuned to the shared sonic dimen-sion of music and speech, although he did not pursuemusic stenography. Henry Pitman, Hints on Lecturing,79.85“Sténographie musicale,” Allgemeine musikalischeZeitung 35, no. 19 (1833): 321–22: “Viele Pariser Künstlerhaben eingesehen, dass die Sténographie eine völlige Revo-lution in der Tonkunst bewirken werde. Das glauben wirauch. Was werden wir dann für geniale Werke erhalten,die sonst bey dem langsamen Notiren im Tintenfassestarben!”

142

19THCENTURY

MUSIC

But revolutions are dangerous: “What willbecome of our music publishers in the future?”the critic wondered; “If one can write downentire pieces in so short a time, who will thenstill buy expensive scores?—and finally, whatwill happen with our composers? Who will buyworks from them?”86 Music stenography wouldfundamentally revise not only the quality ofworks, but also the print-based system throughwhich works are created, disseminated, and con-sumed.

Some twenty years later, anxieties aboutopening the floodgates of easily reproducedmusic had grown even stronger:

If after the performance of a new opera both compos-ers and music publishers had reached a publishingagreement, the astute stenographer would have soldthe best melodies from the opera to every Tom,Dick, and Harry already long before the appearanceof the score, and would have made a considerablebusiness with many people, from music sellers allthe way to organ grinders. And how perplexed wouldGerman composers be if they could not immedi-ately find a publisher for one of their works, e.g., asymphony, in their homeland, and suddenly theyreceived it shipped in neat print from Paris or Lon-don or Milan, or from New York and Boston.87

In addition to exacerbating headaches over nine-teenth-century piracy and copyright law, mu-sic stenography would promise to put new mu-sic into wide and virtually unregulated circula-

tion.88 The appeal of capturing musical inspira-tions was not only related to initial inscription;rather, stenography engendered new potentialto transmit such ideas across geographic andtemporal space, whether for the enrichment ofmusical art or for its eventual ruin. The abovepassages reveal little about what music stenog-raphy accomplished. They do reveal, however,an otherwise opaque link between music ste-nography and its speech counterpart: inflatedexpectations for music stenography echo com-monplace understandings of speech stenogra-phy as a technology that decisively shaped poli-tics and public life.

As a cultural technique of nineteenth-cen-tury print capitalism, stenographic inscriptionwas indelibly allied with dissemination. Al-though music stenographers framed their in-ventions through the purported needs of com-posers, their continual retranslations of speechstenography into musical terms suggest an abid-ing awareness that both music and speech wereconnected to their respective publics throughprinting.89 If music stenographies are reframedas one element in a broader process of text-based mediation, then the fact that few stenog-raphers were composers becomes less surpris-ing. Music stenographers were, after all, stake-holders in the print-based music culture of theirday as much as composers were. Yet unlikecomposers, stenographers looked at composi-tion as something distinct, even foreign. LikeCharles Grelinger, they wondered, “Who knowsif the great masters would have looked downon music stenography? And who knows thatthey did not have their own method or meansof notating their impressions that they neglectedtransmit to us?”90

86“Sténographie musicale,” Allgemeine musikalischeZeitung 35, no. 19 (1833): 321–22: “Was wird in Zukunftaus unseren Musikalien-Verlegern werden? Wenn man inso kurzer Zeit ganze Stücke abschreiben kann, wer wirddann noch die theuern Noten kaufen?—Und was wirdendlich aus den Componisten? Wer soll ihnen die Werkeabkaufen?”87“Musicalische Stenographie,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 1, no. 12 (1853): 89–92, here 92: “wenn Beide[Componist und Musik Verleger] nach der Aufführung einerneuen Oper einen Verlags-Vertrag schlössen, hätte derverschmitzte Stenograph die besten Melodieen darausschon lange von Erscheinung der Partitur an Hans undKunz verkauft und mit vielen Leuten, vomMusicalienhändler bis zum Orgeldreher herab, einerkleckliches Geschäft gemacht. Und was würden diedeutschen Componisten stutzen, wenn sie eines ihrerWerke, z. B. eine Sinfonie, zu deren Verlag sich imVaterlande nicht sogleich ein Unternehmer gefunden,plötzlich in sauberem Stich aus Paris oder London oderMailand, oder aus New-York und Boston zugeschicktbekämen.”

88On the difficulties of simultaneous publication, see Jef-frey Kallberg, “Chopin in the Marketplace,” in Chopin atthe Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 161–214.89Dance saw far fewer such attempts, perhaps due to itslack of a developed textuality or longstanding parallelswith language. Arthur Saint-Léon’s La Sténochorégraphieou art d’écrire promptement la danse (Paris: Brandus, 1852)includes little discussion of real-time recording; the “sténo”of the title indicates rather a system of notation for ballet.90Charles Grelinger, La Sténographie musicale (Paris: Smit,1918), 6: “Qui sait si ces grands maîtres auraient dédaignéla sténographie musicale? et qui sait s’ils n’avaient pas àeux une méthode ou un moyen de noter leurs impressions,et qu’ils ont négligé de nous transmettre?”

143


If my interpretation is correct, then the prac-tical preoccupations of music stenographieswith composition obscure their insights as ex-tended theoretical reflections on the technicalinfrastructure of musical mediation in the printera. Stenographers focused their attention onthe most charged link within the process oftextual dissemination—the moment at whichimmaterial ideas become text. This is the limitpoint of textual mediation: before this border,only the mercurial creative process has sway,while after it, printing and publishing gradu-ally take over. In proffering new techniques forcapturing unmediated inspiration, stenogra-phers dreamed of tearing down this border byextending textual dissemination to the ever-receding point of initial musical inception. Ste-nographers’ propensity for re-notating others’ideas in new and striking symbols suggests thattheir systems supplied reverse justifications forhow music came into being, as if to suggestthat these ideas could have been so conceived.Presented as experiments with writing itself,music stenography developed elaborate fanta-sies about the origin of musical texts.

Stenographic attempts reveal that the dis-semination of print did not run only from com-poser to listener in a unidirectional stream ofemboldened composerly intentions, but ignitedthe imagination of those who consumed texts,inspiring them to consider how the materialobjects from which they played and performedhad been created in the first place. To be sure,music stenographies show that a belief in mu-sical genius as the originating force behind mu-sical composition was a longstanding obses-sion for musicians. But the continued attemptsto breach the barrier between genius and textsuggest how strongly mid-nineteenth-centurymedial conditions consigned genius to a realmbeyond the page, just barely out of textual reach,thereby rendering composers’ inspiration mys-terious, all-powerful, and ultimately unpossess-able.

Textual Recording Technology

From quills and staves to stenographies andpresses, systems of musical textuality perme-ated

Writing at the Speed of Sound: Music Stenography and Recording beyond the Phonograph · 2019. 5....

Documents

Transcript of Writing at the Speed of Sound: Music Stenography and Recording beyond the Phonograph · 2019. 5....