At 11:18 AM 2/15/06 -0500, Andrew Stiller wrote: >I basically agree with David Fenton that >more than 8 or 9 different levels are impossible for the ear to >distinguish.
That can't be true. The very notion of shaping a line has to do with changing its dynamics slightly. Sometimes other coloristic factors are involved, but a simple volume-shaped sample is enough to demonstrate that we can indeed hear these relative differences. Conductors and performers contour lines and adjust balances all the time, in part because the composers make the assumption that they will and so notate only the critical moments. You point out that the difference between adjacent levels has become narrower, and that's true. Did this mean that differences in level could not be heard before, that the players were not capable of it, or that the instruments were not able to produce the distinctions? The question is rhetorical. Whatever the case in the past, the truth today is that the very presence of controllable multiple levels of volume on the majority of music we hear (which is electroacoustic music) provides a standard for performance emulation. What I'm getting at is this: We can choose to call for many subtle levels of volume, and expect them to be attended to, now or someday. As composers, we know some instruments have limited ranges and cannot achieve the louds or the softs, and write with that understanding. But the interior levels are available if we choose to ask for them. However Read berates the decimal volume levels of Nilsson, the composer was far more forward-looking than Read. Read was writing this 40 years ago, but his vision was limited. Today, it is 100% possible to pre-program a device like a MalletKat to these levels as the performer proceeds through a piece, in which case those markings make perfect sense and the music is glorious for it. Further, then, the transition from listening and practicing in order to develop these subtleties is encouraged and challenged by the ease with which such pre-programmed acoustic/electronic hybrids or demo versions of compositions can reveal the importance of them. You get no artistic growth by accommodating the resistance of those trained in methods of the past. In the case of volume levels, it's not an issue of inherent inability, but rather the translation of actual longstanding practice (adjustment of balance) into the score notation (detailed volume levels). Depending on which side of the page you're one, one seems natural, the other tyrannical, or vice versa. One can always argue, as David Fenton does (and I apologize for the summary), that the real world requires adjustment of many scored elements anyway, or as you do, that instruments themselves have limitations. But the presence of scored elements indicates meaning and intention. If you are a composer's advocate, as I am, you believe that the composer's concept is by its very nature the correct one, and what appears in a score is not a suggestion, it is the goal. That goal may include finer dynamic levels, a choice of tuning systems, extensions to the instruments or their abilities, or neural implants for performers to help them along. To be unable to meet that goal does not speak to the accomplished composer's failing, nor even to the performer's failing, but to a performance practice circumstance that has not yet grown into the composer's imagination. Dennis -- Please participate in my latest project: http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/365-2007.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
