On 7 Jul 2005 at 14:04, John Howell wrote: > 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.
That's an odd standard. I'd think the better standard would be that the notational "irregularities" should be justified by the musical content that they are trying to convey. That is, notational innovation should be motivated by trying to notate something that traditional notation cannot successfully convey. And how one can make a determination about the "greatness" of music before learning it (at least at some level), I don't know. Notation and musical style should be intimately linked. It's one of the reasons I'm a big fan of attempting to perform certain early music repertories using original notation -- the older notation was quite often better able to convey the musical content than transcriptions of it into modern notation (the recent discussion of how barlines cause performers to treat non-aligned meters as syncopations was a perfect example; it was Dennis who mentioned it in regard to his own music, but it's equally applicable to all sorts of 16th- through 17th-century music). If the musical style is a new one (for the performer) that means it's the performer's job to learn the new notation. Dismissing the music out of hand just because the notation is non- conventional is missing the point. It's like saying there's no such thing as good poetry in Portuguese, simply on the basis of my inability to read/speak Portuguese. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
