At 08:00 PM 6/20/2007 +0200, Daniel Wolf wrote:
>Dennis wrote:
>
>"A score is a score."
>
>Dennis, with all due respect, this is not the case. We ask scores to
>perform a variety of very different tasks -- prescriptive, descriptive,
>and analytical -- and do so in ways that are often contradictory.
[...]
I agree with almost everything you've said except for the meaning of a
score and the conclusions you draw from your descriptions.
A score's contradictions may be implicit but not simultaneously explicit.
There is only one representation at a time in a given domain, unless
another choice is consciously made, such as when other representations
appear side-by-side (such as notation and sequencer, time and frequency,
etc.), in order, or even overlain. But the means of representing them are
merely kinds of modules that offer given views. (Sure, big modules, but
modules nonetheless.)
Whatever we ask scores to do (be "prescriptive, descriptive, and
analytical" as you say), the fact that you can phrase the comment (in a
single mid-sentence appositive, no less!) implies that it can all be done,
and even the contradictions be represented without needing to be resolved.
(Choose the level of indeterminacy with sliders, for example, as Autobusk
does.)
That programs like Finale and Sonar and others have different modes of
entry and presentation reveals that their designers are already stretching
into as many areas as (economically) feasible and would probably indeed
include them all if they could.
That means we are in a kind of software purgatory. I won't go all Ray
Kurzweil on you, but circumstances don't preclude a near future of a
comprehensive notation (representation) program made of all the programs
plugging into each other and multiple representations being generated from
multiple means of entry from a single front end. Score/part integration or
frequency/time domain integration or notation/sequencer integration are
just basic examples that are already functioning.
Though...
>Each program will have it's own premises and biases
...I don't agree that...
>there will be tasks that are either awkward or impossible to perform
>within those restrictions.
That is the present state, but need not be. Evidence is there. Before it
was retired, Graphire begrudgingly moved to Midi entry when the programmer
realized it was needed -- without playback, since he believed it was a
notation program. Sonar includes a notation pane, but a painfully
elementary one, while providing a wide palette of manipulation tools --
none of them algorithmic. And so on. Finale allows fractional meters, but
not as fractions, and as you say...
>not allowing "display a different time signature" to put
>a time signature with a non-power of two denominator in the score.
None of these suggests to me, however, that a score is not a score. Some
may find themselves on the far boundaries of recognizable score-dom
("Danger Musik for Dick Higgins"), but if it can be represented at all, it
seems to me that a scoring program should offer an integrated means to
accomplish it, a means based on a much greater library of examples. The
lack of such means is a failure of choice, not an inevitability.
Or... wait... the minute this happens, I'll want a three-dimension
representation that can be turned onto another face in order to notate
through the layers of sonic resulting tones, producing a molecular sequence
that will grow a new instrument to play it... :)
Dennis
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