Friends, while Randolph Peters wrote:
I think it is more important in a score to try and convey the spirit and style to musicians rather than bogging them down in minutia that could ruin the outcome.
<rant> I must say it seems to me that in the set of skills which musicians are reasonably expected to acquire is the ability to read the information in a score, and take to account in their use of the score the expressions, articulations, dynamics, tempi, and other directions and indications in the score so that they are not "minutia"! And where does one draw the line between "spirit and style" and "minutia"? I suspect that what is a critical part of "spirit and style" for one musician is a bit of "minutia" for another. I have contemplated at times creating a three dimensional sculpture of a quaver, divided like a jigsaw puzzle into several parts, as a visual exposition of the multiple characteristics of the "correct" note: origin, pitch, duration, volume, timbre, stress, syllable, ornamentation, and termination. The fact is if any one of these characteristics is not right (except perhaps in instrumental music, where the syllable is usually of no consequence), the note is not right.
I sing in a rather good church choir which includes about a dozen paid singers, undergraduate and graduate music majors in vocal performance and professional musicians. I am frequently amazed at how many of these people with advanced musical training seem to think they have done a good job reading the music if they approximate the pitch and the rhythm, ignoring just about every other bit of performance information in the score. I submit that any singer or instrumentalist who does not know how to interpret the "minutia" of a score has given up the right to call him- or herself a musician, as part of being a musician is studying the score. </rant>
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