July 29, 2024
The Power of Printed Music
Linguistics researcher Naomi Baron, Ph.D., on the meaningful advantages of handwritten annotations and scores you can smudge
In recent decades, as our avenues for information have been transformed by technology, music-education resources have followed suit. Books and play-along cassettes became books and play-along CDs and software; VHS lessons became DVDs and then online tutorials. The internet also introduced tablature websites and downloadable transcriptions that scroll along to great-sounding backing tracks. The tablet and smartphone are viewed as one-stop shops for all manner of instructional multimedia. It’s all wonderful, and yet…
Printed method books and scores persist, and continue to be prevalent in school music programs and private music education. To start, they boast a certain unsung convenience and ease-of-use that digital resources can’t compete with. Despite the marvels of digital reading, printed music books remain navigable and affordable—the latter being especially important to schools interested in equity. After all, not every student will be able to buy or maintain a tablet, or have regular internet access.
The simplicity of annotation is also a huge asset. “The pencil-to-paper ideal is still the easiest entry point for elementary students,” says Dan Bilawsky, a music journalist and award-winning band director based on Long Island. “And then there’s the simple human factor to consider. Teaching students how to organize themselves is a significant part of the educational process, and they often forget or lose music. It’s much easier to hand them another sheet of paper than to find another device.”
Beyond these advantages of comfort and logistics, though, could there be other benefits to absorbing musical information in print rather than through a screen? And how do larger conversations around print vs. digital reading translate to taking in musical notation on a page as opposed to via a tablet?
“The pencil-to-paper ideal is still the easiest entry point for elementary students.”
To learn more, we contacted Dr. Naomi Baron, a professor emerita at American University, who has conducted important research comparing print reading and writing to digital forms. Dr. Baron earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford, and she has explored the relationships between different media in several of her 10 books, including her two most recent, How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio, and last year’s Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing.
Baron is also a lifelong music lover who has been an enthusiastic musician. She studied the flute privately and performed in a high-school band, played piano and attended the New England Music Camp. Years later she returned to the flute and piano and took up the challenge of learning the violin, her son’s instrument. She also adores classical music.
Recently, we spoke with Dr. Baron about how her research could apply to absorbing and annotating printed music. She was eager and expansive, illuminating the ways in which personal annotations and the sheer feel of printed materials can support the learning process. Below are highlights from that conversation.
Generally Speaking, the Kids Are Alright With Print
“They like being able to put it on their shelf and look at it. It’s part of their lives now.”
Today’s adolescents are so addicted to their screens they must just love getting all their information digitally, right? Not so fast. Dr. Baron and her colleague Dr. Anne Mangen, together with Kim Tyo-Dickerson and Dr. Frank Hakemulder, conducted revealing studies in Norway and the Netherlands, using middle- and high-school-age students. Data were collected both before the onset of the pandemic and after face-to-face learning had resumed.
“Two of the questions we asked were ‘Is reading in print boring?’ and ‘Is reading digitally boring?’” Dr. Baron says. “And far more kids said that reading digitally is boring after they had returned to face-to-face learning, having endured so much digital learning. So much saturation with digital reading has changed a lot of minds.” She also points to a study from the American Library Association, which found that by and large Gen-Z prefers print and buys more print books than millennials.
Throughout the data that Dr. Baron and her colleagues have collected in recent years, from secondary-school and university students, the sentiment toward print reading is surprisingly and overwhelmingly positive. “They will astound you with the number of things they say,” she observes. “They will tell you that they remember more. They tell you such things as they like the feel of it. They like being able to put it on their shelf and look at it, that it’s part of their lives now. They will tell you about the smell of books. They will tell you reading in print is real reading—their words, not mine. There’s this notion of this is the real stuff, this is genuine.”
It’s All About the Annotations
Informed by both professional research and personal experience, Dr. Baron stresses the advantages that handwritten annotations can add to printed music—writing them as well as reading them.
Prominent learning theories in education demonstrate that “the more senses you engage in the process of learning something, the easier it is to learn and remember,” says Dr. Baron. (All those testimonials about the feel and smell of books? Those indicate additional senses being tapped.) “And if you associate something you’re trying to learn with something else that’s meaningful, then you’re more likely to remember it.”
Which brings us to those delightful, unique, evocative annotations that your guitar or piano instructor wrote in the method and songbooks you’ve held on to. “People identify very differently with things written by hand than things produced on a digital keyboard,” Dr. Baron says. “[You notice] if it was written with a particular kind of pen; you can feel the indentation on the musical score, as if [you or your instructor] really meant it: ‘This has got to be really forte. I’m going to put a big f there, even bigger than what Mozart or Beethoven put.’ It impacts your brain because you’re using different, additional senses.”
In Dr. Baron’s case, she has violin scores with two generations of annotations on them, and those annotations create the kind of meaning that can aid study. When she took up the violin later in her life, inspired in part by her son’s experience on the instrument, she used some of the same sheet music he had so many years earlier. As she practiced a piece like the Bach Double Violin Concerto, she explains, “what came to me was lots of memories of the time when I used to sit in on his lessons: what was going on, the dynamics, how old he was, the caring character of the teacher.
“And then I would have my own teacher put her annotations on top of that,” she continues, “and it becomes a family story, it becomes a history, it becomes something that has a physical life to it. With a digital annotation, there’s no person there, there are no memories of what was going on. There’s no smudge on the page.”
But music students don’t need to wait for their instructors to mark up their scores: Writing your own annotations, says Dr. Baron, can be equally if not more beneficial. She conducted a writing study with 205 university-age students, Americans as well as Europeans, and the results leaned heavily toward the cognitive advantages of writing by hand. “These are people who write digitally all the time,” she says, “[and they told me things like] ‘I remember more if I write it by hand. I think more clearly if I write by hand. It’s more personal. It’s an expression of what’s going on in my head.’
“If you associate something you’re trying to learn with something else that’s meaningful, then you’re more likely to remember it.”
“What does this have to do with musical notation?” Dr. Baron asks. “Doing your own annotations, on your score in your handwriting, sticks around.”
The Truth About Screens Hurts
As any music educator or instructor will tell you, if you want to get good, you need to practice. And sometimes those practice sessions simply need to be long and focused—no social-media breaks, no YouTube rabbit holes. But as Dr. Baron’s research has indicated, screens often aren’t the best option for prolonged concentration.
In the data she’s collected from secondary-school and university students, “there are two large complaints about reading digitally,” she says. “One is that readers get distracted, and the other huge complaint is that their eyes hurt. They talk about eye pain, they talk about head pain.
“There are things they do like—convenience factors and sometimes price factors—but they really dislike what [digital reading] does to their eyes and derivatively to their head, both physically and cognitively.”
Old Scores & Books, New Inspiration
“With a digital annotation, there’s no person there, there are no memories of what was going on.”
Dr. Baron also points to how the sheet music you’ve retained over the years can act as a source of inspiration, spurring a musician to recall past glory or make new breakthroughs. As an adolescent she played flute and piano, and came back to them later on, after establishing herself in academia. “I look at the music today,” she says, “which I can’t play at all the way I used to be able to, but I’m motivated to say, ‘I once could do this. I can do it again. I still have an embouchure. I can still play. I know it’s possible.’”
In fact, these trusted, well-loved physical resources can transcend the music itself and lead to deep personal reflection. To view pieces and annotations you tackled all those years ago, she says, is to ask, “How have I changed as a person? What was problematic in my life then that’s not now?”
“In thinking about music being a thread through one’s life trajectory,” she explains, “you can build not just on your musical story, but on your life story.”
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