Absolutely agree. I think hymnbook style is appropriate for (mostly) homophonic music. But I see music where the Sops and Altos have quite different rhythms and lines, (sometimes even with a lot of the Sops crossing below the Altos), and it's notated in one staff. It's hard to sightread, and takes up rehearsal time.
----- Original Message ----- From: John Howell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Monday, December 20, 2004 1:18 pm Subject: Re: [Finale] The state of the art: a report from the trenches > At 10:27 AM -1000 12/20/04, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >There is also a fair amount of scoring SATB as SA and TB where it > >really ought to be split into 4 staves. *sigh* > > Well, that's hymnbook style as opposed to choral score style. I > use > both, as appropriate. Specifically, when I'm writing for someone > and > I will not be there to clarify things, or writing for publication > (which I'd love to do more of!), I will use 4 staves because > that's > expected. But there's a problem with that when it comes to > divisi. > If I want to go from SA to SSA or SAA, I have to put the third > note > on either the soprano staff or the alto staff. But what I might > actually intend is SMA, with equal numbers of sopranos, mezzos and > altos, and I always wonder whether the average choir director will > take that into consideration. (One of my faculty colleagues at > Indiana University assigned the women in his ensemble to S1, S2, > and > A, but then had all S1s and S2s sing the soprano line when the > voicing was SATB, giving a soprano-heavy sound I didn't especially > care for.) > > Writing for my own college groups, though, in pop styles that were > mostly homorhythmic, I used 2 staves, SA and TB. This allowed me > to > go from unison on each staff to 2-part to 3-part to 4-part very > easily, and I did quite a lot of that. If I got into contrapuntal > passages, of course I switched to as many staves as there were > parts. > It never seemed to bother my students (the men) to switch from > tenor > G-clef to bass clef in the middle of a chart when it was > necessary. > And when I sent out acceptance letters before the start of fall > semester, I included a chart specifying which part each singer was > to > sing in 2-, 3-, or 4-part divisi. > > Editing for my early music ensemble, I make the barlines invisible > when the music seems to need it, and my singers have gotten used > to > it and are less locked into barline rhythms and more likely to > shape > their phrases according to the text accentuation. But again, I'm > in > charge of those rehearsals and can clarify any questions. > > John > > > -- > John & Susie Howell > Virginia Tech Department of Music > Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 > Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 > ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) > http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
