What Is A Transcription?

What purpose does a transcription serve? As sheet music, its intended user is the musician who wants to play. Playing could mean a variety of things for different artists. The college me sought to play note-for-note the jaw-dropping improvisations of Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum, as a shortcut to jazz excellence. But another purpose was to appropriate Tatum and Peterson’s vocabulary through osmosis. The more I played their music, the more I fed my subconscious muscle memory and harmonic mind.

Then, when transcribing Chick Corea in 2018, I discovered that a transcription can be more than sheet music. It is also a historical document: a record of the pianist’s intentions, emotions, approach, and musicality. But how does one distill complex movements, harmonies, and nuanced rhythms into notation? What’s more, transcribing at this level of detail can put your sheet music at odds with the musician who will read it. Sure, 17:12 is the appropriate subdivision Cory Henry played in his rendition of Amazing Grace, but how legible is that for the pianist? In this case, it is fairly legible. The key is to practice playing the notes in that subdivision without regard for tempo, and then reverse engineer your speed to fit within the allotted time in that measure.

So: eccentric subdivisions are still quite playable, but what about ghost notes? Not so much. In my arrangement of How Great Thou Art, I originally used many ghost notes to distinguish between the main melody/harmonic notes and the filler ghost notes. Several viewers commented on how this hindered the playability, and it would be better to simply use regular noteheads all around. This leaves it up to the pianist to try to recreate my style, or interpret into a different style as he pleases. I’ve now sacrificed the historical accuracy of this transcription in order to make the manuscript more playable. Someone who may want to study my transcription from an analytical bent would be unable to detect the nuances of my intonation and approach on the piano.

Another tradeoff is when the pianist is playing quarter notes that are not quite that long, and played more like eighth notes. Should the notes be written accurately as eighth notes, resulting in a clunky array of rests and eighth notes, or should they simply be written as quarter notes? This is one of the many tradeoffs between playability and historical accuracy. As a transcriber, it is my goal to strike a balance between the two, one which may shift depending on the particular transcription and its intended audience.

To learn more about the fascinating intricacies of music notation, I recommend this interview by concert pianist Tiffany Poon with two editors from Henle Urtext, in which they discuss all of the considerations that go into creating sheet music.