The shorthand for music and dance, written words remains. By Jorge Bravo, Azat Ambartsoumian and Diana Campi. Translation to English: Carlos Fava

First of all, we would like to thank you for this possibility of addressing you at this Intersteno Congress, the most important world meeting of professionals in the use of words, today here, in the beautiful city of Berlin, in Germany, a country with a big and important shorthand history and where was born Franz Gabelsberger, the great creator of the shorthand gabelsberger

This presentation, as well as that of Ghent, 4 years ago, came during the visit of our president, Fausto Ramondelli, to Argentina and, in particular, to the Library of the National Congress of Argentina, who has has a section that is called “Special Collections” that includes the “Palant Collection” which have exclusively  books and magazines of shorthand from all the world. There, we have begun the development of the project of microfilming and digitization of books and magazines of shorthand, according to Argentine laws.

Let's remember the Latin phrase Verba volant, scrīpta mānent, said by Key Titus at the Roman Senate: "words fly, the writing remains." What an important statement, is not it? Because it reveals the purpose of shorthand!

And in general, when we talk about the purpose of shorthand, we think almost exclusively of the recording of speeches in parliaments or of testimonies in justice. But there are more areas of application of the stenography. In fact, we can mention the importance it has had in literature, for example. Let us mention some cases, although there are many. Charles Dickens, who in his autobiographical book "David Copperfield" recounts his difficulties in learning shorthand and writing rapidly, regardless of what he later became a parliamentary and judicial stenographer. Or Fedor Dostoevsky, who used the shorthand - through his secretary and future wife, Ana Grigorievna - to write some of his works, as "The Player", in just 26 days. And it would be possible to mention many other intellectuals who also used shorthand or who emphasized their importance, such as Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Spencer, Newton or Mrs. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009.

Why? Because "The writing remains". That is why thanks to the creative genius of some, shorthand has helped not only the words are shorthand and remain in writing. We say this because there have been or there are shorthand systems, but not to record words but other sounds ... and also movements. What do we mean by this? We will try to explain it.

When Diana - who is with me here - Azat - who also participated in this research - and I, we received in the Library of Congress of Argentina our president, Fausto Ramondelli, he was surprised with the book "La sténographie de la musique" ("The Shorthand of Music"), by Jean Kutahialian, published in Marseilles, France. In this book the author develops a shorthand system for writing music.

From there came the idea of investigating this issue, which we did not know. And what happened during the investigation? We find that there is also a shorthand of dance, which is still used today in some countries.

Then, if you agree, we will refer to those two shorthand.

What is the purpose of musical notation for an interpreter? To serve as a guide for reading and recreating the work that the composer imagined at the time of its creation, allowing his work to transcend. Western traditional notation was born to that end.  

While there were previous experiences, these systems came to prominence mostly during the late 19th century and early 20th century both in Europe and in the Americas. The fundamental idea was to replace the classic musical notation system ̶   with its scales and notes ̶ by other faster systems that could make it possible to listen and transcribe a composition even simultaneously.

There were notable proposers in Europe, such as in Spain, France, Italy and Germany. In the Americas we can mention Argentina, Mexico, Perú and Uruguay. In the case of Spain, prominent stenographer Francisco de Paula Martí also invented a system of music shorthand that was only published after his dead by his son Angel Ramon Martí in 1833. Later, in 1895, fellow Spaniard Serafín Ramón Guas y Ezcurdia published Método teórico-práctico de taquigrafía musical (Practical and Theoretical Method for Music Tachygraphy).

Going further back in history, Russeau himself was, according to some, a pioneer innovator with regards to musical notation.

In Italy we found Lodovico Roletti, with his book Nuovo sistema de Stenografia Italiana e Francese e nuovo mecanismo per la Stenografia Musicale (New system for Italian and French stenography and new system for musical stenography).

In France, in 1949, Jean Kutahialian published La Sténographie de la Musique (The stenography of music). There are copies of the latter two books in the Palant Collection of Shorthand Writing of the Library of the National Congress of Argentina. And in this, our country (Argentine) we found two notable authors who created systems of music shorthand: Rafael Hernandez and Angel Menchaca, who was director of stenographers at the National Senate.  The systems created by them are of the chart type and have in common the use of petal-like signs instead of notes.

In one chapter from his book Cartilla Taquigráfica (Shorthand primer), published in 1892, Rafael Hernandez explains his music shorthand or True Shorthand, in which he lays the foundations for this system and claims that its purpose is to facilitate the learning of music. In his system, which is written in only two lines, the value of each note is kept.

Meanwhile Menchaca, who published four books on music notation ̶   in 1904, 1906, 1909 and 1914 ̶  said: "I intend to combine two methods of writing: one for speech and another for music, representing sounds in their most varied combinations in a simple, easy and unequivocal way". 

His system of music shorthand was known not only in Argentina, as it was also published in London and Paris. Taking advantage of his participation in the 2nd International Congress of Stenography, which took place in Paris in 1889, he gave a lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris and afterwards visited the United States and other places of France, Belgium, England and Italy, where he was even decorated.

Among the main features of his system, we can name the following: 

The use of a twelve notes alphabet. 

The use of a single line of writing. This facilitates reading because it replaces the more than thirty positions of the traditional system by only two.

The division of the general scale in dozens, which makes it possible to determine the location of any note more quickly and precisely. 

The use of fewer signs, since it suppresses the pentagram, the supplementary lines, the spaces, the seven keys, the sharp notes, the dotted octaves, the division of the bars, the ties, the double, triple and quadruple dots, the indications of the bars and almost all nomenclature related to the movements, etc.

The name, duration and pitch of all musical sounds are expressed in a fixed manner, without the need for independent auxiliary signs. 

The notation is one and the same for all voices and all instruments.

It does away with the complex array of chromatic and diatonic intervals, major and minor, augmented, diminished, super-augmented and sub-diminished.

All scales of the traditional system are reduced to three series. 

All bars are replaced by a single measure of time, the same that marks the rhythm for all movements.

It gives real time durations to all sounds.

Although the Menchaca system had some diffusion in Argentina and was taught in some schools, with a number of musical performances in a lyrical theatre of Buenos Aires Province, it met with opposition. Beside many supporters, the system also had its detractors. 

Regardless of the level success experienced by the systems created by these different authors, our purpose was to highlight the amount of work they have developed in this area. But it doesn't end here. In fact, there is another kind of art that makes use of shorthand for its representation. It is the shorthand for dance, which will be briefly explained below.

In the case of dance, there exist different notation systems that make it possible to write down movements and thus make them understandable for further reproducing them at any time. Although the earliest record of dance notation dates back to the ancient civilizations of India, Egypt and Greece, it was not until the 15th or 16th century that it began to be developed as a universalized system. Ballet saw the first attempts to systematize its notation and make it universal.

It was in De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi (On the Art of Dancing and Conducting Dances), in 1455, that Domenico di Ferrara, along with one of his disciples, Giuglielmo Ebreo, described the different dances by means of letters and symbols. 

Thoinot Arbeau (an anagram of Jehan Tabourot) proposed in his book Orchsographie (1588) one of the earliest systematizations for describing steps and figures through letters, words and illustrations. The use of letters or verbal abbreviations, which will be found in later treatises, reflects the crystallization of a terminology derived from the oral transmission of dance, and implies the common knowledge of a specific vocabulary.

An unusual event at the time was the discovery in Cervera (Spain), in 1931, of two pages dating from the mid 15th century showing the first attempt to transcribe by means of abstract signs the horizontal and vertical movements of a dancer. Specifically designed for dance, this symbolic notation anticipated the shape of things to come.

Towards 1674, Pierre Beauchamp, conceived a notation system representing the movements on the ground and described the action of the legs in relation to the rest of the body and the music. In this way he was able to graphically describe temporal and spatial information, based on the characteristics of the human body and its symmetries and taking into account the mechanical needs of its bipedal locomotion. Thus, it began to take into account both the horizontal progression of the dance and the gestures made in the vertical plane. 

Inspired by the Beauchamp system, Feuillet published in 1700 his Chorégraphie ou L'Art de décrire la dance (Choreography or the Art of Describing Dance). Fellow French dancer Jean-Georges Noverre's observations on the importance of individual gesture in dance would be taken into account by further notation systems during the 19th century, which tried to transcribe, with increasing precision, the different body movements.

During the 19th century, Arthur Saint-Léon published the "Sténochorégraphie" (Stenochoreography, 1852) and Friedrich Albert Zorn published Grammatik der Tanzkunst (Grammar of dance, 1887). They were both based on a pictographic representation where head and body could be clearly dissociated. The duration of each movement was specified by a corresponding musical notation. August Bournonville also used a very succinct notation system of his own and in his Etudes Chorégraphiques (Choreographic studies, 1855) he acknowledged his interest in the "Sténochorégraphie", although he criticized it as too complex.

Whether too simple or too complicated, notation systems found their obstacles between these two contradictory categories: being able to translate the complexity of movement with precision or being easy to read and apply. The probably most remarkable system of notation conceived during the 19th century was that of Russian dancer Vladimir Stepanov. Very interested in anatomical knowledge, he published in 1892 L'Alphabet des mouvements du corps humain (The alphabet of movement of the human body). Its basic sign was a musical note over a series of lines that represented the different parts of the body. 

Based in the analysis of the human body, this system was superior to the choreographic concept of dance. It was used in Russia by The Imperial School of Dance of St. Petersburg, where it played a fundamental role on the instruction of dancers. This system helped transcribe and preserve many of the works by Marius Petipa and other choreographers of the Marinski. Famous dancer Nijinsky personally used it at the beginning of the 20th century to write down all of the choreography for his ballet L'après-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of a Faun).

The advances of scientific and technical knowledge as well as research on sound, space, colour, forms and movement and the synergy between theory and creation, advances of knowledge in medicine and anatomy and the development of abstract symbolic expression allowed the development of various notation systems for movement and dance. Currently, four systems are mainly used:

Laban notation (1928)

Notation of Conte (1931)

Notation of Benesh (1956)

Notation of Wachmann (1958)

Laban developed and interpreted concepts about movement and dance. Because the whole theory would be too long to cover here, we would like to point at least some of the more relevant aspects:

"Labanotation": is a way of remembering a set of movements by means of symbols.  It establishes a technique of reliable written language for movements, dynamics, space and all the actions the body must perform.

"The icosahedron technique": this allows studying dancers to see the points toward and from which they must move, improving their precision in performance. 

The four main aspects of the movement technique are the following:

Time: it is sudden (quick) or sustained. 

Weight: movement maybe strong or light.  The factors of time and weight mark the dynamic quality of the movement.

Space: is related both to the way in which the movement takes place and the direction in which is done.   The concept of kinesphere, the "personal space", also belongs to this category. It is an imaginary sphere built with all the points within reach of the body at its maximum extension, keeping the feet on the ground.

Flow: this factor is present throughout the entire movement and gives the sensation of being bound or free. 

Laban defines the archetypes or simplifications that he uses as "fundamental shape forms": a straight line, an open (curved) shape, torsion (S) and rounded shape, which are derived from the basic form and the spiral shape, truer to the actual organization of the body and many forms present in nature. 

Another important aspect of choreographic notation is that of copyright. In some countries, courts would only support the right of the choreographer over his work if it has been previously written down. This is a strong point in favour of all systems of notation that allows a work to be registered. We may point as well that, in some countries, audiovisual systems are not currently as safe as it is notation.

All important systems of notation have evolved into their own software, beginning in 1982 with the DOM, followed by the Shorthand dance notation, Morris dance notation, etc.   

The applications are:

Dance Forms - dance animation software for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows

Expressive Character Animation - Expressive Ballet animation using Benesh Notation

LINTER - a UNIX and X windows for LED that generates animation via the nudes animation system

BALLONES - 'Ballet Animation Language Linked Over Nudes Ellipsoid System' a lexical computer interpreter of Classical Ballet terminology

Country Dance animation project - Java and XML animation - using Labanotation (development on hold).

Morris Dance notation uses the ABC music notation language and related software for UNIX, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows and MIDI applications.

This is a very brief synthesis of our research. Today, rather than deepen technical aspects - we can reach those who are interested - we only wanted to make known the existence of these systems of shorthand notation for two branches of art: Music and Dance

In the case of Music, beyond the acknowledgments were also many repairs that had the authors and, unfortunately, we can say that the musical shorthand today is no longer uses.

But, the use of the shorthand notation of Dance is still valid and is now used for choreography, both in Europe and America. We can say we have contacted a choreographer who uses the shorthand notation system, so our intention is to continue the research and deepen it. And, why not, in the next congress we may have the possibility that whoever exposes is someone who uses this system.

Finally, we invite you to provide information on whether in your countries have had some development these two systems of shorthand notation. If you want to write us to request information or give us information, you can do it to the mail that we see on the screen. Thus, we will continue to build the history, the present and the future of our profession and contribute to the growth of our beloved Federation, INTERSTENO, with research that will consolidate your work and your presence in the world.

Kutahialian shorthand system for writing music.

Notation of Benesh (1956).

L'Alphabet des mouvements du corps humain.  Vladimir Stepanov.