At 12:39 AM -0400 5/31/09, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 30 May 2009 at 19:21, Christopher Smith wrote:
Things that are not easy to accomplish in Finale or Sibelius simply
don't appear in notation very often any more. I would include some
specialised jazz notations among those items, though I think most of
Dennis' argument was based around graphic notation. This means that
the next generation might not want to see a hand-formed jazz turn
(gruppetto) and might not even recognise it, for example. Falls used
to be notated in relative length. Now that there is one, maybe two
lengths of falls in the articulation tool, we won't get that level of
detail much any more.
That is actually not a new phenomenon.
The old dot vs. stroke controversy c. 1800 has always struck me as an
interesting example of engravers having to make decisions on which
engraving tool to use when copying from a manuscript in which the
staccatto marks could vary from a dot to a hasty dot that almost
looks like a stroke, to strokes that are so small they look like
dots, to regular strokes, and all the way to hasty strokes that are
very large and sometimes lean and look like our modern tenuto marks.
An excellent example, David. (And a potential doctoral dissertation
for someone, if I'm not mistaken!)
Other things that come to mind: The impossibility of beaming notes
together in the 16th century, when music was set up with individual
pieces of movable type, each of which carried a note or rest along
with its own short length of the 5-line staff, which carried through
into the 20th century in the vocal music of publishers who continued
to set individual, unbeamed 8th notes and shorter. And, in contrast,
the wildly-variable swooping beaming of notes together without
letting such things as beats or bar lines get in your way (which
might actually have carried some important musical information) after
the technology of engraving on copper plates was developed in the
17th and 18th centuries, which has carried into modern notation to
the extent that beaming over barlines is something that both major
engraving programs, which are locked into discrete measure, have had
to deal with.
Not to mention, of course, that the introduction of paper into the
music copying business in the 15th century meant the abandonment of
black notation and the introduction of white notation, when some of
the inks of the time could spread along the wood fibers in the paper
and make blots.
Point well made.
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
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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