Beck’s new album is a folder of sheet music. As well as harking back to Tin Pan Alley, it means that how the songs sound is up to you
When is an album not an album? Beck has just released a collection of sheet music in association with the hip publisher McSweeney’s and, on this side of the Atlantic, Faber and Faber. The 20 new songs in Beck Hansen’s Song Reader have no recorded counterparts and so hark back to an earlier age when Tin Pan Alley-composed sheet music was a mass musical form and songs had titles such as The Unlucky Velocipedist, Get Off Cuba’s Toes and I’m a Cake-Eating Man.
Meticulously designed, the collection is made up of beautifully illustrated song booklets in a hardcover folder. Beck’s songs have evocative titles such as The Wolf Is on the Hill, Mutilation Rag and Rough on the Rats.
The album also features a preface by Beck, an introductory essay by the music critic Jody Rosen, a guide to sheet music by Bettie Ross, a music editor, lovely covers (by the likes of Leanne Shapton and Josh Cochran) and a few old-fashioned advertisements (for, among other things, a “pro-phy-lac-tic clothes brush” and shoe horns).
Why sheet music? It was only a matter of time. The music industry is in a state of chassis, but as the business model flails it seems to have greater tolerance for eccentric ideas. (If nothing sells anyway, then anything goes.) There has also been a trend for formats to become fashionable once they’re clearly obsolete. Vinyl has long been the musical purist’s favourite format, and, more recently, hipster labels have returned to the humble cassette.
Not only was a resurgence of sheet music inevitable at some point, but no doubt another hipper indie musician is teaching songs to wandering minstrels or flirting with plainsong.
The music publishers that exist now to administer royalties and rights once made their money by publishing song sheets for popular tunes. “Once you could buy sheet music on the street,” says Michael Nichols, owner of the Opus II chain of music shops, whose own family were selling sheet music from May’s on the Green as far back as 1880.
It was only in the 1920s that sales of recorded music began to outsell the printed variety. Music fans never looked back. “Why was sheet music a popular form?” asks Desmond Earley, a professional harpsichordist who teaches performance at University College Dublin’s school of music. “It was before recorded music, before there was music available in the supermarket, before there was music in the lift. We take music completely for granted now. Two hundred years ago most people only heard music when they went to church or a concert. In the 19th century they had musical instruments in their homes or were part of amateur orchestras or played traditional music. If they heard a piece of music they liked they would try to buy it and learn to play it. That was often the only way they would hear it again.”
Re-creating musical sounds
The primary point of musical notation was to help re-create musical sounds you couldn’t otherwise hear – a purpose rendered largely obsolete by recording technology. There is still a niche market for the written note, but it’s largely for professional composers and musicians, choirs, music students and a dwindling band of hobbyists.
“We still get people, sometimes young people, coming into the shop looking for the latest Adele or X Factor songs to play on piano,” says Nichols. “But it’s not a big market.”
Beck’s logic, according to his preface, is that in an age when music is increasingly thought of as an ephemeral background noise, by encouraging fans to play his songs they will engage with them more deeply.
“Everyone knows that if you learn how to play a piece of music you experience it in a different way to if you’re just listening to it,” says Dr Jennifer Walshe, an acclaimed Irish composer who lectures at Brunel University, in London. “And what Beck’s doing, though it seems like an almost retrogressive move, it’s actually very now. It’s like Jay-Z’s Black Album, which everyone sampled and remixed, and that was part of the fun of that album – all the different remixes that were done and the weird clashes between them.”
Beck himself writes: “The opening-up of the music, the possibility of letting people work with these songs in different ways, and of allowing them a different accessibility than what’s offered by all the many forms of music available today, is ultimately what this collection aims for.”
Walshe also notes that university music departments are starting to look in the opposite direction, at untrained musicians. “I think it’s interesting that Beck is bringing out a song album with notation as the universities are thinking about how to integrate musicians who can’t read music,” she says. “Say you have this kid who’s really amazing at writing dubstep but can’t read or write music: how do you teach that kid and not bar their entrance to the university?”
And Beck’s prim and proper reader is an almost a quaint, dainty throwback compared with contemporary classical-music scores. Walshe’s own work is as likely to include instructions calling for “a rustling bag of leaves” or “the sound of water over rocks” as crotchets, quavers and treble clefs. One of her pieces involves a written description on a T-shirt of how to learn to ride a skateboard. Another is made of wicker.
Graphic scores
Such “graphic scores” began in earnest with Earle Brown in the 1950s, and they often aim for indeterminate results. “Notation is changing all the time,” says Walshe. “It will be interesting to see what it looks like in 50 years’ time.”
Beck just wants you to play his more conventionally structured songs. He’s not pernickety about how they’re arranged – “personalising and even ignoring the arrangements is encouraged” – and already nifty fan recordings have made their way on to YouTube and other social-networking sites, usually with the Song Reader prominently displayed in the accompanying videos.
He has basically set his fans a challenge. (As Jody Rosen puts it, “The new Beck album reads great. How it sounds is up to us.”) And it is a challenge. There are classically trained musicians who read sheet music for pleasure and could sight-read these ditties in their sleep, but I suspect that is not the case for most Beck fans.
For nonclassically trained amateur musicians (and their long-suffering neighbours) painstakingly picking out the notes on a piano is slow work. I started working on a sweet song called Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard and 40 minutes later was crooning a wonky version (which I quite enjoyed) before realising I’d been reading one of the notes wrongly.
“I think it will be interesting how people arrange them,” says Jennifer Walshe. “The most interesting ones will be those which sound nothing like Beck, the ones that use children’s choir and bagpipes.”
My version didn’t have children’s choir and bagpipes, but it certainly sounded nothing like Beck.
