I like how Donald Erb puts explanations in his scores. He doesn't
make them too lengthy, but if the requests are unusual, he will often
put an "!" at the end. Sometimes his comments are humorous. "You will
sound like an insane monkey," and that kind of thing. It gives the
musicians a laugh, but more importantly, it communicates the intent
and spirit of the piece.
Other times he writes about dynamic balance in places where
traditional expressions don't quite convey what is wanted. For
example, he might ask one player to match the volume of someone else,
or "alter" another's sound, while a different player is told to
always stay in the background. That's not quite the same as giving
two musicians a forte marking and the other a piano, or using
Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme, especially when you want the music to
rise and fall, ebb and flow. Or when you want to create unusual
mixtures of timbre. Erb's acoustic orchestrations have a lot in
common with the way you make combinations of sounds and control the
attack, delay, sustain and release in electronic instruments.
With Erb's music, amongst many others, there is an exploration of
instruments at their extremes. At the extremes you sometimes have to
explain what the effort is like and what the result is. A flute, to
use a simple example, played quickly at its low end is not very loud.
Do you write "as loud as possible" or mp or what? There are two
schools of thought when it comes to dynamics -- write the resultant
dynamic or write the effort you want to go into it. A brief
description can clear that up. Multiphonics are like that as well.
Sometimes you have to blow your brains out just to get that quiet
high partial to appear.
The drawback to using a lot of blurbs and text blocks to explain
things is that musicians from other backgrounds and languages might
not get the idiom or nuance.
"To communicate is our passion and our despair."
--William Golding, Free Fall
-Randolph Peters
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