Dennis Bathory-Kitsz writes: My comments are not about either perfection or 'strict adherence to the printed score', they're about playing -- or being committed to play -- what's written down without excuses or slovenliness, and for the conductor to (a) notice and (b) point it out.
[snip]
It's also not made clear from the start that the players are expected to do their best to perform what's shown on the page, and not willy-nilly think of notational indications as optional niceties that their compositional judgment, however immature, may override.
It really *is* staggering, and an example of a point I've made before on this list: that many performers (and, it seems, conductors) don't ultimately care about the music they're playing -- and so composers are wise to insist on detailed notation rather than leave judgments in the hands of players they don't already know well and trust implicitly.
David has ably set out the problems faced by amateur ensembles and their conductors. I would like to comment on another aspect of Dennis' remarks.
Dennis, you are indeed arguing for "strict adherence to the printed socre." The problem is that musical notation never has, does not today, and never will give the performer absolutely all the information needed for a performance. There are always assumptions, often never even thought about. That's called "style." Music always has been and always will be a collaboration between composer and performer (often with an arranger standing between the two, and with a large ensemble always with a conductor standing between them). The responsibility is shared. In the Baroque era that was understood by composer and performer alike. In the Renaissance it was an absolute necessity, since the band leader or head chorister always had to make performance decisions on something as simple as the distribution of parts among singers and instrumentalists. The musical notations developed in the 11th century by Guido, added to in the late 12th century at Notre Dame de Paris, and further developed by Franco, Petrus de Cruce, and Phillipe de Vitry in the 13th and early 14th centuries gave the minimum amount of information needed by the performers. Notation changed when music changed, and new ways of indicating new melodic or rhythmic concepts had to be newly invented, just as happened during the 20th century. It was a blueprint, albeit a crude one in some ways (but very exact in others), from which the performer was expected to create a performance, and it was understood that probably no two performances of the same music would ever be identical. That's just as true (or should be) of every Baroque piece using figured bass, and every jazz piece using chord symbols.
It's fine to be prescriptive, if that is your mindset, and to say "I want everything that's on the page and nothing that isn't on the page," but music isn't one damn note after another. Music must communicate, must have soul, and must touch the heart and mind of the listener, and markings on a page cannot do that. A skilled, musical, artistic performer can, taking the notes as the blueprint they still are today, and finding the music that is hidden in those markings. In a very real sense, music is phrasing, and phrasing has too many variables to be completely rendered in notation. To draw a crude analogy, a carpenter may follow a blueprint exactly, but he has to decide where to put the nails. And if his blueprint contains an error--equivalent to a composer specifying a tempo that sounds like crap--he has the responsibility of fixing that error.
One difference between today and previous centuries is that the old guys weren't composing for publication, for glory, or for "self-expression." They were composing for next week's concert, for the week after's church service, for the Duke's garden party, or for themselves and their own students. And yes, they were ALWAYS writing for singers and players whom they already knew well and trusted implicitly. And they were such fine craftsmen that their music still speaks to us, even though we may have lost the instictive way of interpreting that music that both the composers and the performers took for granted. When you write for publication, you lose the right to pick and choose your performers, and you face the reality of having your music played by fallible human beings whom you do NOT know and trust implicitly.
I'm not foolishly saying that a composer's wishes aren't very important, but with rare exceptions the composer isn't the performer, and has responsibility to provide as detailed a blueprint as possible, to make sure that it is playable AND sounds good as written, and to answer in advance any questions that may arise. On that we agree. And the performer's responsibility is to take that blueprint and turn it into music, using the tools that are available. Barring mental telepathy, that isn't going to change.
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
