Reddit reviews The Musical Ear: Oral Tradition in the USA (SEMPRE Studies in The Psychology of Music)

>So why don't classical musicians learn by transcription?

Assuming the premise. They do.

If you've ever taken an ear training class at a music school or conservatory, you no doubt would have had to do dictation and sight singing (responding to your "the vocalization of the music should be more important than the actual notation itself" comment, though I have to admit I'm a bit mystified by it). Of course, transcription from a recording is something you can only do with recorded music, but if we look at how things worked out historically, you'll see that there was still a lot of oral/aural pedagogy in European classical traditions before recording technology became available. Figured bass and partimento pedagogy was the primary way composers were trained in Europe through the eighteenth century; sources of partimento realizations are scarce, so it's assumed that notation was rarely involved and much of the pedagogy was oral.

But let's expand our discussion of oral/aural tradition out further. Music is more than pitches and rhythms, you know. Here are two excerpts from Anne McLucas' The Musical Ear explaining the role of oral transmission in the interpretation and nuanced shaping of classical music:

>Any teaching of classical music involves an enormous amount of aural learning; the teaching of the nuances of everything that needs to be added to the pitches and rhythms that are printed on the page is learned aurally from one's teacher or by mimicking other players or recordings. Since our notation is not capable of showing most of these nuances, it is often their execution that makes the difference between a well-trained musician and a poorly trained or even an untrained one. This kind of aural/oral transmission is probably no different in America than in other places where
Western music is taught.

>However, there are other kinds of oral transmissions at work as well, especially at the upper echelons of musical training, and they are especially strongly emphasized in American institutions, in part because of the necessity born of our history, that we have often felt that we must prove ourselves vis-à-vis European musicians. This, this oral transmission reflects the transmission of a method through a line of teachers, tracing back as far as one famous, preferably European, one. For example, Theodor Leschtizky, a pupil of Czerny, who himself had studied with Beethoven, started a line of teachers that passed on the Paderewski and Schnabel, and also to American students. Amy Fay wrote a memoir recounting her studies with Leschtizky's teacher, Ludwig Deppe, as well as wit Liszt and other famous pianists in the 1870s; and Ethel Newcomb recounted her studies with Leschetizky at the beginning of the twentieth century. (114)

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>The presence of a lineage can also have a direct bearing on how a particular piece of music is taught. For instance, in the published editions of Chopin, there are opposing philosophies on whether they should be created from manuscript and published sources or should include variants that came from the students of Chopin, whose corrections to his own published works, which often were riddled with errors, were passed down through the oral tradition of his students. For example, according to one source, there are at least fifteen variants for the Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 2, several of which are not even published, but have come down through the oral tradition of his various students, each of whom heard and notated slightly different things. In the even more amorphous tradition of how to play Chopin—the application of agogic accents, rubato, dynamics, pedaling, and tempo—the lineage directly from Chopin through his pupils is even more important. Already of Chopin, wrote: "Chopin's compositions … run the risk of being misunderstood if one has not known the master's way of playing, his intentions and his conception of the instrument—since their result on paper is quite different from that of the sound world in which they really live."

>Surprisingly, these differences of opinion show up even in performance practice of twentieth-century composers, whose own playing has been recorded. In her article on Debussy and his early interpreters, Cecila Dunoyer contrasts the descriptions of Debussy's playing of his own works—and his recordings—with that of several of his early interpreters, finding significant differences, even in the generation contemporary with the composer. (117)