On 07 Jul, 2004, at 03:43 PM, Christopher Smith wrote:
I started teaching part-time (jazz composition) at the Universit� de Montr�al a couple of years ago, and the stuff I had to go through to find translations for all the jargon was ridiculous! For example, almost every francophone I have ever met or worked with uses terms like �swinguer� for the verb "to swing", yet the Office de la Langue Fran�aise
Oh boy, here it comes...
(known around here as the Tongue Troopers) utterly rejects any anglicism whatsoever. They found an old citation from the 20's of an author talking about swing, and he said "interpretation rythmique ternaire" (ternary rhythmic interpretation, which is not even accurate besides being unwieldy) so that's what they insisted on.
Damn, that's funny.
Of course, I assume these OLF people knew nothing whatsoever about music, let alone jazz. (I mean, had any of them even read a frickin' Monteal Jazz Fest program? Or listened to a jazz show on Radio-Canada?)
Being a mere anglophone, my arguments cut no mustard with them, so I had to enlist the help of Richard Ferland, one of the other faculty members and author of the only French-Canadian books that I know of on jazz theory, to argue with them.
Good call -- I assumed you eventually prevailed.
But I DO say "do mineur sept b�mol cinq" while pointing to "Cm7(b5)", as almost every jazz musician in Qu�bec does.
Did you mean as opposed to "do demi-diminu�"? Because that's what I remember most of the francophone students at McGill using. It wouldn't surprise me if the same generational divide between "minor seven flat five" and "half-diminished" also exists on the francophone side.
It's the pointing at "C" while saying "do" thing that struck me as incredibly funny when I first noticed it -- it's actually a nice encapsulation of French-English relations in Canada.
- Darcy
----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY
_______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
