Ed, There are physical limitations to plucked string instruments that make it hard to decide when a note is being held as opposed to a silence. This is one problem I see with the handling of tablature by Finale: they use tied notes all over the place to be hyper-precise, but it seems to me this obscures the tablature unnecessarily - particularly when syncopation is involved: every note that starts on an upbeat is transformed into two tied notes... I suspect this has more to do with the underlying structure of the software than with the music itself. In a similar way perhaps, Renaissance printers had to deal with a limited supply of symbols - you can see the impact of that when you compare a manuscript like the ML to a printed work of the same period. In that "the medium is the message" line of thought, it is quite interesting to look at the difference between V. Galilei's manuscript volume and the printed Il Fronimo - the manuscript seems to me much more playable, the music more native to the lute than the printed pieces. The Barbe MS is very interesting in its pedagogical precision and imaginative use of color: I think we have a lot to learn from it in terms of balancing clarity and precision - now that everybody owns a color printer... (except me of course). In summary: notation sometimes comes in the way of the music; it is not always easy to tell what belongs to the notation proper from what belongs to the music. I don't think players always give much thought to those questions, but when you develop music software you are always painfully confronted to the various deficiencies of your own system. I guess the best insight we can get from this is: don't play the notes, play the music - even if it means simplifying, adding, etc. No matter what's on the page, it is probably not exactly what Dowland or Piccinini or Johnson really played anyway... Alain
At 08:51 AM 6/9/2004, Ed Durbrow wrote: > >Where the singer's > >staff notation part ends with a long, the lutenist's tablature has a > >pause sign instead. I've not looked very far, but my guess is that > >longs were generally confined to final bars, where the exact length > >of the note was not very important. > > >That is most interesting Stewart. It got me to thinking, I wonder if >those signs that look like fermatas in Dalza are really just a way to >notate a breve. That's more or less the way I've always played them. >I don't think I've ever come across a longa in tab. >cheers, >-- >Ed Durbrow >Saitama, Japan >http://www9.plala.or.jp/edurbrow/
