On 13 Nov 2002 at 18:34, John Howell wrote: > >Of course, in early music, you often must just make a guess. I think > >all the people who try to make complex and exact conversions between > >the old meters are making a huge mistake -- all you need to do is > >absorb the feel of the music involved and the conversion basically > >takes care of itself. Rigidly attempting to maintain a metronomic > >equivalence is itself going to be anachronistic in that context, > >whatever particular theorists may have said. > >David W. Fenton > > I know exactly what you're saying, but I can't completely agree with it. > The "rules" or conventions or performance practices or whatever they were > did exist, musicians were raised learning them and knowing them, and we > have to start by assuming they were observed in practice, our inheritance > of 19th century subjectivity notwithstanding. . . .
But we don't *know* what they were taught or how they performed it. All we know is what some people said about it who were trying to impose a system on what was not necessarily systematic. > . . . My own approach is to do the > scutwork of figuring out the tempo relationships according to the theory, > and then simply try it and see whether it works and makes musical sense. > Most often it does; sometimes it doesn't. They weren't any less prone to > making exceptions than we are! But there's a section in the early, happy > part of Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" where you really have to do the math, figure > out the exact proportions, and then practice your part because the dance > sections go like the wind! It works musically. I wasn't speaking of dance music. That has its own sets of rules, obviously. > >Theorists were, after > >all, theorists, so they often rigidly define things that were not at > >all strict in practice. > > No, they were not simply "theorists" in the 20th century sense. . . . I was speaking of the people who wrote "treatises" as theorists, people who were attempting to impose structure on musical practice. Mode 2 Parisian Organum is a theoretical construct, necessary to provide completion in the theoretical structure of Garlandia, Anonymous 4, etc. Once it was theorized, it started being used in music. But it was a theoretical construct first. > . . . There was > no job description for a "Music Theorist," any more than there was for a > "Composer." If you were a musician, you were first and foremost a > musician. You performed, and you were hired to perform. Zarlino was in > charge of the music at San Marco and one of the organists if I remember > correctly. Every composer whose work we know from the manuscripts and > prints was a working musician who sang or played for his supper every day. > Composing was a sideline or added bonus. That doesn't mean that the process of writing out rules for how the things work does not tend to obscure many of the details. > I agree completely that sometimes they worked extra hard to make a > theoretical system complete, and that they took a rather long time to catch > up to what other musicians were actually already doing, but when they wrote > about what musicians were actually doing, they did so from their own > personal experience, not because they had to publish or perish. > > You're right in that early music you must often make a guess. I just > happen to think that an educated guess is better than a random or > subjective one. I think that looking at the musical content is more likely to get you a decent result than rigidly trying to manage some kind of metronomically precise equality between the two meters. Obviously in some cases there is an obvious equation between the meters. But in many cases, the rules can produce musically unsatisfactory results. In those cases, I have no qualms whatsoever in discarding the results of applying the rules from the treatises and using good old-fashioned musical sense to decide what sounds good. -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
