On 14 Feb 2006 at 21:56, Mark D Lew wrote: > On Feb 14, 2006, at 11:52 AM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > Well, let me say that anything other than ppp to fff is ridiculous > > -- there's no possible way to actually make such gradations in any > > meaningful sense. Anything beyond that range is voodoo notation, in > > my opinion. > > I wish I had the proper quote, but I recall reading about how Verdi, > when asked about the "pppppp" marking in the Requiem and "ppppppp" in > Otello, remarked that all he really wanted was pianissimo, but the > singers didn't take notice if he just wrote "pp" or "ppp", so he kept > adding p's to get the point across.
That's exactly the kind of thing I mean by "voodoo" notation -- writing something different that what you want, thinking that somehow it's going to get you the right result whereas writing literally what you want won't do that. How is a performer supposed to know the difference? Actually, I guess as long as pppp and ppppp and pppppp all mean the same thing (as soft as possible), it's not such a bad thing. But if someone wrote something like: pppp subito ppppp I'd consider it to be absolute insanity. Indeed, I have a passage in one of my own compositions where a piano passage crescendos to a subito pp, and I'm not certain I think that's good notation or not. I guess if I specified the end point of the crescendo it might be something more like "p cresc. mp subito pp" but I'm not sure I feel any more comfortable with that. Somehow, we got along with no dynamic markings at all in notated music for centuries, and then we managed with f and p (and their equivalents) for a shorter (but still fairly long) period. I'm not sure that the multiplication of gradations has really accomplished anything in terms of actual subtleties of performance, given the non- specificity of the markings and the importance of context. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
