"Translation implies interpretation” p. 31
“Can observations on literary translation be applied, by analogy, to translation in music, in other words to transcription? Definitely yes, even if there is an obvious difference between a written text available to all to read, interpret and translate and a score to be performed. Language is an instrument of common and practical verbal communication, but it can also be literature, prose and poetry. Music is always ‘literature’, and its transcriptions, which often imply a vast and complex network of interactions, will never present their author with the dilema that the translator of poetry must often face: whether to be more faithful to the meaning or to the wording of a poem, that is, whether to betray one dimension for the sake of the other.” P. 32
“Art music too can rely on transcriptions of oral traditions; we all know this and, having learned a lot from Béla Bartók, I am myself particularly sensitive to that experience. But music cannot go very far back in time and explore creatively a distant past: its instruments and materials are not as permanent as a written page. Music is vulnerable. We can read, translate, and discuss Homer in depth, bu we can only theorise or barely imagine how Greek music was, because we have never heard it.” p. 33
“This is to say that musical transcription, seem from a historical perspective, implies not only interpretation but also evolutionary and transformational processes. The practice, the possibilities, and the needs of transcription were an organic part of a musical invention and also a natural step in the professional development of a musician.” p. 35
“Copying, the simplest form of transcription (…) Copying, like transcription, implies some sort of identification with the copied or transcribed text, and also an act of generosity. Walter Benjamin said that there is ‘a kind of saintly vocation in the sheer act of copying’ and that ‘the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out…Copying is to be the text being copied.” p. 35
“Over centuries, the progressive diffusion of printed musical scores, and of transcriptions, generated countless mysteries that would have taxed even Sherlock Holmes.” p. 36
“As in music, in all languages there are translations that are copies, translations that are ‘faithful portraits’, and paraphrases that are a travesty of the original. There are translations which germanise the French original, or Americanise the Italian, and vice versa.” p. 36/37
“But there are also literary works which resist translation; they may only be interpreted, paraphrased, described, or commented upon. These include Mallarmé’s Le Livre and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Any attempt at translating these would be distinctly difficult, if not impossible or pointless. The reasons for this impossibility have something in common with music. In Finnegans Wake the symbolism, the syntax, phonetics, iconic imagery, and gestural content create a series of semantic short circuits, a polyphony of associations that leave no leeway whatsoever for alternative expressions or enunciations.” p. 37
“The same thins often happens in the music of the twentieth century - aware as it is of its past history, yet eager to detach itself from it - where a transcription would become an improper and even destructive act. To translate Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Mallarmé’s Le Livre, or the poetry of e.e. cummings would be like transcribing Debussy’s Jeux, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Boulez’s Marteau sans Maître, Carter’s Double Concerto, Stochhausen’s Gruppen, or most of my own works. It would be like carrying out a completely arbitrary operation on works whose meaning lies, among other things, in the interaction of their acoustic components, in their musical characterisation and functions, in their specific sound relationships, and in the ’thematusation’ of those relationships.
Transcription was - and still is, at times - an instrument of popularisation. In the early nineteenth century music was made known principally through four-hands piano transcriptions, a decidedly less passive but also less accurate equivalent of today’s CDs and radio broadcasts. Adaptations and transcriptions were part of the currency - sometimes a counterfeit part - in the big business of Italian melodrama. Franz Liszt’s piano transcriptions and paraphrases, addressed to a cosmopolitan socialite public, contributed immensely to the evolution of piano technique and greatly furthered musical exchange, even though they have little bearing on the stature of Liszt as a composer.
Transcription has often been used, at least partially, to comment upon and to assimilate elements from past and foreign experiences. This is why it is so difficult, sometimes, to assign precise borders to the vast territories of transcription. The embittered, jostling expressive ‘objects’ that populate Mahler’s world and, from a very different perspective, the direct references to real-life sounds in the visionary musical documentaries of Charles Ives are significant examples of commentary and assimilation as an indirect form of transcription.” p. 38/39
“Chemis IV … The articulation of the soloist are alternatively extended, prepared, or unexpectedly foreshadowed by the instrumental group, creating a dialogue of ‘mobilities’ and ‘immobilities’, of ‘before’ and ‘afters’, of ‘memories’ and ‘forgetfulness’. They look ahead, they look behind, and naturally they always look at each other.” p. 43/44
“A dialogue between a pre-existing musical text and the otherness of an added text can therefore be developed through multiple forms of interaction, from the most unanimous to the most conflictual and estranged. But it is exactly though these moments of estrangement that a deep connection with the initial data, with the given material of the solo instrument, will be both challenged and justified. By ‘initial data’ I don’t necessarily mean something that comes earlier in time. It is possible to develop concertante situations in which the solo instrument becomes a generator of functions that are entrusted too the instrumental group, which in turn generates the solo part; thus the group generates something that already existed, in such a way that the solo is no longer a generator but a result.
This implies the possibility of transforming and even abusing the text’s integrity so as to perform can act of constructive demolition on it. Transcription seems to get drawn into the very core of the formative process, taking joint and full responsibility for the structural definition of the work. It is not the sound that is being transcribed, therefore, but the idea.” p. 44/45
“ ‘So, Berio, what is music?’ After a moment of baffled silence, I replied that music is everything we listen to with the intention of listening to music, and that anything can become music.
(…) I can now qualify it by that anything can become music as long as it can be musically conceptualised, as long as it can be translated into different dimensions. Such conception, such translation is possible only whiten the notion of music as Text, a multiple-dimensional Text that is in continuous evolution." p. 49
“[Jakobson] He gave the well-known example of a missionary in Africa trying to convince members of a local community not to go around naked. ‘But you’re naked, too’, replied a tribesman, pointing at the missionary’s face. ‘But only my face is naked’, said the missionary, to which the candid reply was: ‘Well, for us the face is all over!’
The most significant vocal music of the last few decades gas been investigation exactly that: the possibility of exploring and absorbing musically the full face of language. Stepping out of the purely syllabic articulation of a text, vocal music can deal with the totality of its configurations, including the phonetic one and including the ever-present cocal gestures. It can be useful for a composer to remember that the sound of a voice is always a quotation, always a gesture. The voice, whatever it does, even the simplest noise, is inescapably meaningful: it always triggers associations and it always carries within itself a model, whether natural or cultural.
Music, I suppose, will never retreat from words, and neither will words retreat from music. Words on music can themselves become a sort of transcription of musical thinking. However at times music seems to be surrounded by a Muzak of verbalism. Beautiful and ugly, music and non-music, tonal and atonal, closed and open, formal and informal, spoken and sung, traditional and modern, free and strictly are certainly all legitimate and conventional terms. But musical experience seems always ready to contradict what is said about it, particularly when this is expressed in peremptory terms, with the father moralistic slant of binary conflicts. The dilemmas provoked by binary oppositions can lead us to ask ourselves if musical experience is more significant than the argument it prompts. Or whether the dimension of concrete experience and the dimension of the discourse which translates the experience into words are perhaps interchangeable. But we are also led to think that a conflict or contradiction has no point because music cannot be true or untrue the way a discourse can. I cannot, as a behaviour, be either good or bad. Nor can it be reduced to a ‘thing’, or to a procedure that is open to manipulation by a discourse. It is a vicious circle. Discourses on music do not perturb us - or we wouldn’t be here now - but we know that music can occasionally perturbs us when, leaders with meanings, it begs to be spoken about questioned, and repeated to an elusive elsewhere.” p. 49/50/51
“The musical work seems to need the constant reassurance of a verbal discourse that would act as a mediator between its outer form and its essence. This is even more true when the direct experience of a musical work is not easily connected with that familiar and conciliatory notion or art, or with the common belief that the music we listen to has something to do with what we feel and therefore could say about it. There are times when the translation of music into words seems to substitute for direct experience. But since music’s more salient and enduring contents are above all conceptual, this substitution is meaningful only if the words actually contribute to outlining the process of thought that underlines an experience that tends to be free of verbal associations.
A discourse on music can become a substitute for musical creativity when it strays into areas which music itself cannot knowingly enter.” p. 51/52
“We could fill pages and pages with descriptions of behaviour and conceptual paradigms which, combined with a detailed analysis of concrete experience (exactly what type of analysis is always an open question), could perhaps contribute to a coherently ramified vision of the translation of music into words. But I am not too convinced that this operation could produce satisfactory results, given the constant evolution of the phenomena in question.” p. 53/54
“Transcribing or analysing the work of others, in Europe or America, is always a bit like tasing about ourselves.” p. 55
“Béla Bartók is one of the most significant and complex examples of musical bilingualism. Between the world of melodies, m rhythms, metrics, and folk harmonies that Bartók was exploring and the word of ‘cultivated’ music in which he developed, there is an indissoluble and profound relationship that is an integral part of Bartók’s creativity. In the dev elopement of large forms, Bartók, rather than transcribing folk melodies, transcribes their inherent, implicit meaning. Therefore, in most cases he invents them. Furthermore, Bartók develops a dialogue between the original peasant musical materials and a formal construction (whether an ‘arched’ one based on ‘golden section’ proportions, or one based on ‘axial’ harmonic procedures) that keeps them organically and morphologically distinct, yet structurally inseparable - a true fusion, an amalgam of seemingly disparate structuring elements, and not merely an emulsion ready for all users.” p. 55/56
“I do not believe that Adam, in that famous garden, ever received the divine gift of an universal musical grammar, eventually doomed to destruction in the Tower of Babel.However that may be, in closing this second lecture I would like to say that these remarks have been like putting a message in a bottle and casting it out to sea - a cautious, circumspect message. Now and then music sends out hesitant cues as to the existence of innate organism which, if fittingly translated and interpreted, may help us pinpoint the embryos of a universal musical grammar. I do not think that such a discovery can be useful to musical creativity, nor to the utopian prospect of a perfect, common musical language that will enable musicians to speak and be unanimously spoken. But I do think that it could contribute to exploring musical experience as a ‘language of languages’, establishing a constructive interchange between diverse cultures and peaceful defende of those diversities. I hope so. In the meantime, we’ll keep translating.” p. 60