On 8 Jul 2005 at 1:05, Owain Sutton wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > On 8 Jul 2005 at 0:34, Owain Sutton wrote: > >>>Of course, I'm something of a heretic in the early music world for > >>>ignoring the relationships between meters there, too. I think it's > >>>better to take a precise relationship as a starting point, but then > >>>to adjust that for musical purposes. > >> > >>I'm with you here. And I think Ferneyhough would be, too. > > > > But that approach makes a mockery of 2-decimal-point precision. > > Why is it inapproptiate to give decimal-point metronome marks which > will be ignored, but perfectly appropriate to state "Q=80" and see it > equally ignored? (Although I'm not necessarily stating that this is > the reason Ferneyhough uses these metronome markings.)
Well, I didn't say the markings would be ignored, only that they can only be imperfectly realized. Even Q=60 is going to be realized inaccurately, so the idea that one would specify decimal points for something that is not even going get a whole-number accuracy of realization is ridiculous. It's false accuracy. One could get whole-number accuracy for the metronome setting by specifying 16th=243, but that's equally absurd. Here's an example I once heard at a dissertation defense: The dissertation was a study of the instruments built by the piano maker Graf of Vienna. The person writing it took all sorts of measurements of parts of the actions of the instruments with a micrometer and included those measurements to some absurd number of decimal places. At the defense, she was asked these two questions: 1. did piano makers in Vienna at this time use instruments with micrometer-level accuracy? 2. isn't it possible that many of the wooden parts have shrunk by some unknown amount making such accuracy of measurement meaningless in terms of what it tells us about the original dimensions? 3. is the variation between identical parts within the same instrument greater than the precision of measurement you've indicated? The answer to the first question was NO, and the answer to second was that we have no real idea of exactly how much the parts have shrunken or not (though there are upper limits on that). The answer to the last question was YES. Adding decimal points does not improve accuracy in areas that can't be meaningfully measured at that level of accuracy. Another example: no one would give the distance from the Earth to the Sun in miles, feet and inches. -- 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
