In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Christopher BJ Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
At 1:17 PM -0400 7/12/04, John Howell wrote:
Pardon me for stating the obvious, but those signatures are meaningless. We do not have a "10th" note or a "24th" note in our notational system,
We sort of do. In a dectuplet (ten eighths in the space of 8 eighths) the logical way to call one of the tuplet notes is a "tenth note", it being slightly faster than an eighth note. If there was a passage where bar 1 was 4/4 filled with dectuplets, then the composer wanted two more OF THE SAME VALUE in the second measure, followed by a downbeat in the third measure, then I might be tempted to notate that second bar as 2/10 as being the clearest way to illustrate what I mean to sound. The equivelant 1/5 as a time signature, while perhaps more truthful, would not be as clear in the example I gave.
I don't often DO that, but I realize that some composers need those tools.
My wife says you can't argue with how a composer thinks, but with my composer's hat on I would try very hard to avoid this notation. In this situation, I presume earlier bars had straight eighths and the dectuplets indicate precisely how much faster the new notes go than the old ones. If this is the reason, it could be indicated by a "Poco pi� mosso" marking with "new EEEEE = old EEEE" (E = eighth note) beside it, and a new time signature of 5/4 or 10/8. In many circumstances this would save a chunk of rehearsal time.
If I were about to spend more time with the new note value, I would definitely consider a metric modulation - in fact, I mostly do it that way and for that reason in my own music. But if I only had a measure (or more on point, half a measure) of dectuplets, followed by two more 10th notes, I would probably opt for my method as being more likely to be read correctly with less rehearsal time, at least for the musicians I write for. Don't get me wrong, I don't support arcane or difficult-to-read notation for its own sake, and I WOULD try to find the best way to notate something unusual, but sometimes you have to go for it, and be ready to wrestle with the consequences. I like to think that I pick my battles carefully, too, as you do.
And for what it's worth, I absolutely support arguing with a composer about how he thinks. Sometimes a composer (well, me) is thinking too much about the process, and not enough about the performance of a work, and it is useful to hear feedback about comprehensibility of his (my) notation. I am one of these relatively old-fashioned composers who wants his music to be played and understood readily. The composition process is of much more interest to ME than to the listener, unless the creation process is an integral part of the listening experience, which I have to admit doesn't apply a whole lot to what I write.
And by the way, these forms of time signatures were spelt out by Henry Cowell, in "New Musical Resources". In 1919.
Do you have any idea how many times they have been used since? They don't seem to have caught on to any great extent.
Not me that was quoted, but I see them pretty often in the scores I peruse. Often enough to consider them a new standard, anyway. And as I said, I wouldn't hesitate to use them if I thought they were the clearest way to put across what I needed. (Oops, I meant to say "what the MUSIC needed." I am not my music. At least, not invariably.)
Christopher
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