On 17 Mar 2010 at 12:02, Michael Greensill wrote: > Wow! A new word every day. > > I had to look up inegal....not easy, it turns out it's a French word > and we need the accent on the "e". But here's a site that explains it > and gives musical examples and mentions swing! > > http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory20.htm
Unfortunately, that article disseminates precisely the incorrect sense of inegal that I'm complaining about, i.e., that it's principally an alteration of duration (as opposed to principally a variation of weight, which secondarily alters either the perception or execution of the actual durations). It's surprising how much that short passage gets completely wrong (the sole musical example has zilch to do with inegal), and how much about the topic it omits entirely. For instance, the emphasis on the idea that it's mostly limited to slow movements is completely wrong. It happens in both slow and fast movements. And the old saw about French vs. Italian has been shown to be untrue (though the inegal practices were different for the two styles). Dolmetsch and his followers were early pioneers in trying to figure out how to perform early music, but much of their research has turned out to be incomplete and even misleading and wrong. It's more a starting point than an end point. That said, it's not clear to me what the source for the information on that website may be, i.e., if the name of the site has anything really to do with the lineage of the information conveyed there or not. > I've very much enjoyed the intelligent comments on strings and swing. > I get to do quite a lot of Symphony Pops charts and I've found the > only phrasing for a whole section that can vaguely pass muster in the > swing department is to write quarter note triplets against a 4/4 > rhythm. The fundamental thing about string sections is that they watch > the damned conductor instead of listening to the drummer! It's my guess that one of the reasons for the persistence of braindead 2:1 swing/inegal is that it's hard for a "professional" group to do anything more "subtle" than that in the scant rehearsal time available. -- 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
