On 7 Oct 2008 at 7:11, Christopher Smith wrote: > I have been thinking for a number of years of creating a sort of > Einsteinian "grand unified music theory" that, in one relatively > simple formula, describes everything about a piece of music that you > would need to know. This way, if you are able to read the formula, > you would understand the work immediately and wouldn't need to listen > to it, thus saving time and confusion and eliminating the differences > in perception between listeners.
Notation + oral tradition has done a pretty good job over the years, seems to me. The failure is almost always in conveying the oral tradition, though, and the weakness is that oral traditions are so easily lost. The other problem in our time is that one basic notational system is being used along with numerous oral traditions, and the performer has to be smart enough to know which of the latter to apply in any particular situation. > (in case anyone missed it, it was a joke!) I'm not as upset about the current situation because I consider the lack of precision a feature rather than a drawback. The more control the composers want, the more likely they will stifle creative reactions to their music. On the other hand, in times of big shifts in musical style, notational precision often changes as a way to indicate that "this music is not like what you expect it to be" -- the music of Beethoven and his contemporaries is a good example of this, where they needed to add in a lot more details in order to convey to the performer that they were asking for a different approach to dynamics and accent. But in the end, it all worked out pretty well, no? -- 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
