>Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2002 13:59:10 -0800 >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mark D. Lew) > >Perhaps I'm a narrow-minded reactionary,
No, that's me. Remember? > but I don't really comprehend how >such a time signature would work. Even the display of it leaves me >wondering, and the function even more so. It's a notational convention seen in Ferneyhough, Boulez, and Schnebel (and a few others). The rhytmic and metric notions involved go back to Cowell (who would have used an even more idiosyncratic notation). I have read suggestions that the composers of isometric motets may have even had similar things in mind, but I am not sufficiently involved in that area of music history to judge. Anyways, time sig 2/3 means "take the pulse of the triplet-half from the underlying 4/4 (that may or may not be anywhere to be seen, but who cares?) and gimme a bar wif two of 'em. N' don' gimme none of dem triplet brackets or whaddno." Oh... I see someone else has explained that in the meantime. Too late. When you start getting to 4/7, using tuplets and compound meters become unwieldy and ambiguous, no longer cutting the Coleman's. >Also, I'm still not clear on how you mark a triplet as a triplet when only >two of the three notes are there. Cowell, of course, used different noteheads to denote non-binary subdivisions of the beat. Ovverwise, if yer feels like it, jes' writa bracket. This Finale lets you do quite easy 'nuff. >From: John Bell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 14:07:30 +0100 > >It seems to me you *could* write that as 6/8,2/8,6/8 (eighth-notes >always equal). It's not necessarily any easier, but does avoid the >fractional time signature. Many people here are _engravers_, and their job is to get Finale to do what the composer wrote, and not to tell composers how to do their job. Many composers still work with pen and paper (certainly the Ferneyhough/Boulez generation), and this sort of inventive notation is the easiest thing alive in that medium. The suggestion to struggle on within the limits of pre-20th C. conventional notation in a music that is trying to break the boundaries or pre-20th C. musical thought is not really where it's at. To be honest, I don't see the point. >From: "Julian Besset" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 17:18:49 +0200 > >Yes, but Frenchman Boulez may be applying the popular Gallic >saying : Pourquoi faire simple quand on peut faire complique More literal translations are familiar in English, too; such as: "Why do something the easy way when there's a hard way instead?" My favorite variation (with years in academia under the belt): "Two weeks in the laboratory can save two hours in the library." However, in the case of _Marteau_ (and, for that matter, Schnebel or Ferneyhough), this simply doesn't apply. Notationally, 2/3 time is the *simplest* way of communicating what's going on. Yeah, it's tough with Finale, but that's Finale's fault. For the composer with pen and paper, and for the engraver with stencils and lead sheets, and for the performing musician (save the narrow-minded reactionaries), 2/3 is the way to go. Tha-tha-tha-that's all, folks! -- P. --------------- <http://www.bek.no/~pcastine/Litter/> --------------- Peter Castine | lp.y: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Weibull/Rayleigh distribution [EMAIL PROTECTED] | _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
