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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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
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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.
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J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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.
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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.
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J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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
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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.”
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J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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.
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19THCENTURY
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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.
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J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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.
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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.”
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J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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.
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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
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J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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.
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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).
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J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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
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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.
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J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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!”
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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?”
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143
J. MACKENZIEPIERCEMusicStenographyand Recording
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