This was reconstructed from fingering instructions with no information on rhythm or pitch. Maybe by looking at the crude drawings available of the instrument to make a better guess what the pitches might be, but this is definitely more of a creative interpretation than a historical record.
Even if rhythm and pitch were available it would still be a creative interpretation. With full sheet music we don't always know the full intention of the composer or the nuances that would be taught in person.
> Even if rhythm and pitch were available it would still be a creative interpretation.
The important difference here I think is that with a well-defined and understood notation there is a shared frame of reference for interpretation. I can take take two interpretations of works from BWV where the performers can liberally indulge in artistic license where the notation leaves something up to the performer, and I can reflect on the differences and similarities without ever mistaking them for different compositions.
Here, it is not just the interpretation of the notation by the performer that requires creative license, but the interpretation by who ever "transcribed" it to modern notation. The video in the article plays two different such interpretations that for obvious reasons then sound entirely different and are not recognizable as the same piece of music, because they really are not.
If you take away the pitch and rhythm information from BWV and add a long forgotten system of tablature for some long forgotten instrument that we've only ever seen represented as crude carvings and ask people to transcribe and play it, you'd get similar results.
But the notation does leave something up to the performer, just a bit more than usual.
Relative changes are what makes the melody, you could transpose it up or down and stretch the pitches every way that you want, change the tempo etc but it still would be (for me, at least) recognizably the same melody.
I often pick up on artists borrowing bits and pieces (and sometimes more than bits) from each other by looking at the structure and the relative changes even if it sounds completely different.
> But the notation does leave something up to the performer, just a bit more than usual.
We don't know how much the notation leaves up to the performer. For all we know there could have been a formal system for tuning the instrument this was intended to be played on and a formal system for rhythm; a musical tradition that makes it very obvious how the piece should have been performed that is now forgotten.
> Relative changes are what makes the melody, you could transpose it up or down and stretch the pitches every way that you want, change the tempo etc but it still would be (for me, at least) recognizably the same melody.
This is not simply a matter of transposition or a tempo difference. No one knows the relative changes in pitch.
A lot more than usual. Leaving the rhythm open to interpretation, much more so than pitch, can lead to wildly different pieces of music. It's like having no punctuation. You can end up with an entirely different piece.
Agreed, although in a lot of systems of early notation the rhythm is sort of implied by the text and contextual clues such as knowing whether a particular piece was a certain sort of dance and therefore the likely range of tempi and main beat stress patterns etc. I think it was around 1300 BCE when western music notation included both pitch and rhythm (with mensural notation).
That's true, without knowing the rhythm and the phrasing it could sound entirely different than it originally did.
But just absolute and relative pitch changes would be fine with me.
Sometimes you can recover some of the rhythm by looking at the notes though. And the shape and size of the Lyre plus knowledge about the materials used could give a fair approximation of what the pitch range should be.
Shape and size won't really help since we'd need to know the string tension and spacing. Otherwise it could be literally any scale with any shape and size. It's hard to express just how enormous the difference between musical modes can be when you leave modern tuning and standards behind. My favorite example of a completely different system of music is Gagaku, Japanese court music with ancestors extending back to Han dynasty China and even beyond. Listen to that next to some Bach; that seems like the possible range of interpretations we might end up with!
Relative changes in pitch are only the simplest level of abstraction in examining a melody. Beyond that, all note events exist relative to chord structure, harmonic ideas, and even other music that performers and listeners are already familiar with. We would be missing everything except that base layer, which I'd argue conveys next to nothing (even pitch, while technically one dimensional, is interpreted cyclically with each octave. So, note 1 is higher than note 2. But is it really the same note, just 1 octave higher? Or is it something in an entirely different key?).
EDIT: Just for illustration, in Bach, the most similar note to a C (with the simplest harmonic relation) is an octave higher/lower C, but the second most similar is a G or F, halfway across the octave! But the most dissimilar is a Gb, a difference of only a half step and directly between those two! From this we can see distance tells us nothing about harmonicity. This is the same issue we see with the difference between major and minor - qualitatively enormous but quantitatively tiny.
Yes but there's different degrees of creative interpretation. To
boomlinde's point, modern "reconstructions" of the hymn differ wildly, to the point that a listener wouldn't be able to tell they were the same song, or even that they were really related.
If your argument is just that "everything boils down to a creative interpretation", I don't see how this is a really meaningful or interesting take.
The point is that there are widely varying degrees of creative interpretation, and this "transcription" is _nothing_ at all like interpreting a piece of sheet music.
