On 15 Jan 2011 at 13:44, John Howell wrote: > And of course one has to assume that the Parisians didn't invent the > rhythmic modes just as a theoretical exercise, but because they were > already singing some music rhythmically but had no means to notate it. > Composition and notation have leapfrogged each other throughout > history.
Actually, it's a bit more complex than that. Modal theory was developed to systematize a practice that already existed, and that had developed without a theory behind it. But not the WHOLE of modal theory. Some of the modes did not exist in the music at the time the theory was developed, and were only theorical concepts created to make a logical theoretical structure that fit the Medieval idea of how a theory should work. Mode 2 was invented as a necessary logical correspondent to Mode 1, and it's really quite rare in most of the modal music (if there's any evidence for it anywhere at all, in fact -- there are big arguments over this among modern scholars, of course). All the other modes are just elaborations of the distinction between modes 1 and 2 (subdivisions of the first two modes), so this follows through the other modes, as well. This is a case where musical practice was changed by theory, in that theory conceptualized a possibility that had not yet been used in actual music (mode 2), and then composers took the theory and (presumably -- that argument, again) started writing music based on the new theoretical concept. The evidence for all of this is quite difficult to divine, since first of all the system itself is so difficult to know unambiguously what was meant in the first place, but even that aside, because so many of the sources were copied later and show scribal interventions that disambiguate the old notation using Garlandian and Franconian notational elements that were available to these later scribes. So, in many cases, we don't know what the original notation would have looked like at all, and we also don't know if the later scribes were interpreting it correctly. In a sense, it's a situation like if we had only Brahms's piano transcription of the Bach Chaconne and had to attempt to reconstruct the original version from that. How much is from Brahms? How much is from Bach? And in the case of the later scribes, we don't even know if they properly understood the old modal notation, so their clarifications might very well misrepresent the original. And then we can't really firmly date all this stuff, so we can't say if mode 2 only appeared after a certain point, i.e., after the theories were developed. But to me, the story of the beginnings of rhythmic notation is a case where practice came first, but was soon significantly shaped by the theorizing of the practice, which opened up possibilities that did not yet exist in the practice, and which then started to be used in actual composition. -- 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
