On 14 Apr 2005 at 15:23, Ryan Beard wrote: > In my composer's case, he hasn't had much of an > opportunity to write for viola. Now, his violist > friends who have heard his other compositions want a > viola sonata from him. He wrote in treble clef because > it's faster for him to get his ideas down. He told me > to put it in alto clef and change to treble where > appropriate when I engrave it. What's wrong with that? > Oh wait - apparently everything...
You have to know something about how an instrument is played to write good music for it. Yes, generic music can be written that will sound OK on any instrument. But it's awfully easy for someone who has no experience with an istrument to write things that are absolutely preposterous or that just don't work very well at all. Someone who can't even handle alto clef seems to me to not be likely to understand much about writing idiomatically for the viola. When I write something for an instrument I don't play, I make sure to run it by someone who plays the instrument. A year or so ago I wrote a difficult high passage for violin. A good friend who is a seasoned pro looked at it and admitted that nothing I'd written was impossible, just that no one would ever be able to make it sound good. He told me all the explicit places where it was a problem, and I made alterations. The result was that it sounded much, much better than what I had originally wrote ever could have, but it still contained the same musical content that I'd been trying to convey. I've played a lot of stuff written by young composers for viols, and they make no distinction between their writing for viols and their writing for modern strings. The result is that they write things in ranges that just don't work on viols, or that are incredibly hard to play (accurately or not). My guess is that these folks would be better off writing for modern strings, and that they were using viols only because they were made available to them. And I'm not even addressing *exploiting* the specifics of the instrument itself, including both strengths and weaknesses. On the viol, there are certain things that you just want to try avoiding if it's crossing the two middle strings (where the major 3rd is), because too much string crossing leads to problems (especially if you immediately require a shift to higher positions). There's also the issue of how poorly arpeggiations work on the viol in comparison to modern strings. It's a result of the tunings of the strings in mostly 4ths rather than 5ths, and that tuning means that you end up changing strings far more often than on modern strings (the widest melodic interval you can play on a single string without a shift is a major 3rd). Also, it's not wise to write something that requires too much playing above the top fret on any other string other than the top string. Even the Bach gamba sonatas don't do all that much of it (though there's quite a bit of use of that register on the A string, the next-to-the-top string). Then there's the issue of making use of open strings on the gamba, something that is *preferred* (as opposed to the modern string preference for closed strings), and the usage of chordal passages and double stops. In other words, there are hosts of idiomatic aspects of writing for the instrument that you're not likely to know unless you've played the instrument (or one very similar to it) or have the lucky opportunity to work with a performer who will teach the subtleties that only first-hand experience can teach. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
