At 1:31 PM -0400 9/16/11, Raymond Horton wrote: >I want to clarify when I said some anthems from the 80s that were >published with an open score with bass clef for tenors. I said I >remember them as being easy to read, or something like that.
Things get really interesting when we start talking about specific situations. Here's one that's different yet. For 14 years I shared arranging duties with a colleague for the university show ensemble I directed. Our approach to arranging and the WAY we arranged was different, and that made for a nice variety. And we were both writing for a 22-voice cast (plus a 12-piece showband behind them). For my vocal charts I almost always used 2 staves: treble clef for the women and tenor G-clef for the men. Why? It simply fit the music better, kept most of it within the staff, and didn't run into the lyrics between the staves. And when you're copying by hand with commercially-printed score paper you can't move the staves around!!! Plus which in commercial vocal writing the "bass" voice is often not a bass line at all, but a low harmony part. In fact you don't WANT your bass voice down where it conflicts with the string bass or bass guitar (or bass trombone or bari sax) in the sonic spectrum. Paul, on the other hand, tended to use treble clef for ALL the voices, more often dividing them into "high" and "low" or into "high," "medium" and "low" rather than the more classically-oriented SATB. It was simply because his own background was strongly in musical theater, where that's what is written almost all the time, and the octave intended by the treble clef is left somewhat up in the air or else indicated as "boys" or "girls." And our singers never had a problem figuring out what we wanted, although there might indeed be a few questions during the first rehearsals of a new chart. But neither one of us notated for the convenience of piano players, which is what this discussion is really about. For them we provided a chord symbol line (or I did; Paul was our primary keyboardist and didn't need one for his own charts). And our 2nd keyboardists simply learned to comp from chord symbols, or else already knew how when we accepted them. Every situation is different. But complaining about notation that is absolutely standard and has been for years or centuries is sort of counterproductive. John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music School of Performing Arts & Cinema College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences 290 College Ave., Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[email protected]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "Machen Sie es, wie Sie wollen, machen Sie es nur schön." (Do it as you like, just make it beautiful!) --Johannes Brahms _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
