On Fri, September 28, 2012 10:53 pm, John Howell wrote: > As you may have noticed, I tend to take an > historical view of these things.
...which, though immensely interesting, is not always illuminating -- this article in New Music Box makes some very good points about the futility of making historical connections, especially linear ones: http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/the-tyranny-of-lists/ > The notation is NOT the > music, just a guide to help reproduce the music, > sometimes relatively exact, other times > relatively inexact. This statement is easy to say and sounds like a gimme, but it's not. The readable object -- the 'notation' -- is one of several doorways into the music, just as a performance is a different doorway. Sometimes, as in the case of the 20th-century avant-garde, the visible object is the largest doorway, reaching most of the actual piece directly. Sometimes, as in transcriptions of, say, Coltrane, it is a doorway into what *was*. Sometimes it's a doorway opening upon a banquet table of possibilities. The idea that it is "just a guide to help reproduce the music" not only misstates a lot of actual practice but demeans the role of notation as a beautiful and meaningful object presented for itself, or at the very least presented as a unique way of organizing and nourishing the thought process around both the re-creative act and the creative act. That out of the way, I agree with much of the rest of your post ... though I'm not nearly as much of a control freak about how my music is played, replayed, or, um, 'adjusted' in performance. If I want control, I've always got (back to the original topic) Midi or electroacoustics. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
