On 1 Jun 2010 at 6:45, dhbailey wrote: > It's all well and good for a composer to feel that some new > notational device is necessary for correct communication of > what he/she wants the music to sound like, but if nobody > among the performers understands it, will the music ever be > performed correctly?
I completely sympathize with your point of view, and think a lot of 20th-century music is unnecessarily complicated rhythmically (often prescribing rhythms in a degree of precision beyond what musicians can physical perform). On the other hand, my experience with immersing myself in the style and notational conventions of the 14th-17th centuries, with the old "white note" style of longer note values, has taught me a lot about the value of not modernizing the notation to conform to modern familiarity (i.e., halving or quartering note values), but instead of training the performers to become fluent in the older style. An example of this is one of the pieces we did on our April concert, Schütz's "Auf dem Gebirge." It's in quite an archaic style, and we renotated the modern edition. We didn't have to change the note values, but we took out half the barlines (which were clearly added in the modern edition). The result was this: http://tinyurl.com/2bh7ex5 => http://tearesofthemuses.com/Editions/Scores/Sch%fctz- AufDemGebirge/Sch%fctz-AufDemGebirge.pdf ...which was a re-barring of this: http://tinyurl.com/22m7awd => http://tearesofthemuses.com/Editions/Scores/Sch%fctz- AufDemGebirge/Sch%fctz-AufDemGebirgeOriginal.pdf The incipits at the beginning of the edition (from 1969) made it clear that the piece had been rebarred. We've done this piece in the past, as well as other pieces from this edition, and have always had counting problems. Well, what do you know, but with the barlines restored to their proper place, it was easier to read and perform than with the modern rebarring! This is not, I think, simply because the group is familiar with the style of the piece and accustomed bo playing white-note meters (we had two first-year students playing, in fact, neither of whom has much experience with the music of this period), but because the version with the original bars is simply more natural for conveying the musical content. To me, it would have made more sense to keep the original barlines and halve the note values. My point in bringing up this example is that by condescending to your performers supposed weaknesses, you may be making it harder for them to produce good music! -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
