At 5:45 PM +0100 7/7/05, Owain Sutton wrote:
John Howell wrote:
If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it sounds like triplets,
it's triplets.
Except if it's not grouped in threes.
In which case it doesn't sound like triplets!
Feel free to invent your own notation; just don't expect us old
fogey traditionalists to read it.
We're not inventing it - we're nearly a century late for that.
OK, I can't argue with that. The original notation was nothing more
than mnemonic aids to help monks (and choirboys) remember chants that
they had already memorized. Thanks to Guido, Franco, De Vitry, and a
few other forward-looking folks, that turned into a graphical system
that, once learned, permitted music one had never before heard to be
performed in a new place. There are still musical cultures in the
world in which the entire concept of one person telling the musicians
exactly what to play and how to play it is good for a big laugh. And
unfortunately a certain kind of composer has taken more and more
responsibility away from the performer and tried to overcontrol every
aspect of interpretation through ever more obscure notation.
Part of an arranger's job is often to transcribe something from a
recording, and I've done it enough to understand quite thoroughly
that notation cannot and does not specify every single aspect of
interpretation. Or perhaps it's more fair to say that it IS possible
to notate every aspect (although where to place the phonemes a singer
uses can be a real problem), but that the result is essentially
unreadable. Interpretation is a performer's job. The composer who
tries to notate every aspect using more and more complex
notation--whether old or new--has lost sight of that simple but very
important fact. A composer is not necessarily the best interpreter
of his or her own music, just as a poet can almost never read his or
her own poetry as well as a trained and sensitive actor.
New music has always called for new notation or, more often, new
modifications to existing notation. No argument from me. But the
purpose of notation is, and always has been, communication. I simply
do not choose to learn or perform music that requires me to learn
new notation, unless the music itself is so great that the effort is
worth while. Maybe I will come across such music. Maybe it will be
by members of this list. It just hasn't happened yet, so the "new"
notation, whether it is nearly a century old or not, does not
communicate with me. Not anyone else's fault, just my loss, I guess.
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
