At 7:17 AM -0400 4/1/08, dhbailey wrote:
While I agree that none of the situations is problematic, are you looking at the manuscripts (or facsimiles) or are you looking at the engraved music? If looking at the engraved music I doubt that Beethoven or Schumann had any input into how the rhythms were engraved.
While David's comment--and David Fenton's similar one--is absolutely on target, I suggest that BOTH miss the important point. Whether the printed music reflects Beethoven's or Schuman's or anyone else's preferences, IT REFLECTS CURRENT PRACTICE at the time it was engraved! Publishers, and their editors and their engravers, aren't going to deliberately do bizarre things just for the hell of it. They're going to do things "the way they're done," which basically comes down to two criteria: (1) tradition--a VERY important factor, and (2) technology and what it does or does not permit.
If music printed from individual bits of musical type allows slurs or beams, I certainly don't understand how! (Not that I claim expertise in the field, of course.) And from that technological inability comes the TRADITION (which thank goodness is finally fading away) of printing vocal music with hundreds of individual, indistinguishable 8th, 16th and 32nd notes identifiable only by how many flags they carry.
Engraving on copper DID allow both slurring and beaming, although a great many of the plates that resulted, with their gracefully curved beams, would be rejected by those in present company who insist on controlling the angles of beams to a nicety. But that was "how it was done."
I basically agree that it's easier to sightread when one can divide the measure into quarter note areas, but making that an absolute rule would rule out the continuous syncopated rhythms that are very common in both jazz and classical writing, almost to the point of being a reductio ad absurdam.
John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
