>> I asked the guy who supplied me with this about the single line system, >> and he said that he couldn't think of "any serious application" for >> that. > Modern Scottish snare drumming and the Swiss Basel style from which it > derives both use the single-line system which Jack Campin described. See > http://www.fastlane.net/~rbeckham/basl2.html > http://hjem.get2net.dk/aapd/drummers_archive/trommenoder.htm > for examples.
So do all orchestral scores I've seen. Pulling the first miniature scores I can find off a shelf: Schoenberg, "Variationen fur Orchester", Universal Edition UE 12196; Bartok, "Dance Suite", Boosey and Hawkes B&H 16154. The Bartok is a revealing example because there's one point where there are four unpitched percussion parts going at once and they *aren't* merged into one stave. I have never seen an ethnomusicological percussion transcription that used anything else, either. The sort of example I had in mind was Neil Sorrell's "Guide to the Gamelan", where pitched instruments are written in 5-line staves and unpitched or one-pitch ones like the gong ageng in one-line. I haven't seen any example from the Islamic world that wasn't two-line. If a composer is using off-the-shelf music paper, five lines is the only option (most people seem to just use the middle one). But publication is different, and reflects less ad hoc reasons. And now that any composer with a word processor can print music paper with any layout they like, I'd be surprised if some don't deviate a lot from the regularly spaced five-line grid. I can't find any example of the drumkit notation Atte is talking about among scores I own (nearest is the Henry Cowell example in John Cage's "Notations"). I don't own any drumkit scores. Looks like this notation hasn't been taken up for anything else. The more fundamental reason behind this is that in kit drumming the kit is effectively a single instrument with relatively few components played by a single musician. That is not true in any other genre. If you tried to notate something like Stockhausen's "Zyklus" on a five-line stave you'd have to change the line assignments every few seconds of elapsed time, even though there's only one performer. And for an African drum orchestra piece where everybody only has one instrument, you aren't making it any more readable by squashing five people's music into one stave. Perhaps the merging Atte wants might be a display option, the way staff merging is in abcm2ps and BarFly, but it shouldn't be forced onto kinds of music where it's completely alien. A Highland pipe band drum corps would most likely regard a piece of software that did it as totally unusable. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
