Jim Abraham wrote: > The thing I really don't like about tablature is that it's hard to > measure > intervals and in general to get a spatial sense of the music by > looking at > it.
That just means you're note experienced enough with tablature. If you were new to staff notation, you'd have the same difficulty. > I've often read that tab was necessary given the many different lutes > in > different tunings that one might write for. But most lute tablature, at > least in modern editions/transcriptions is usually identified as being > for > one instrument or another, e.g. "for renaissance lute" or even "for > renaissance lute in G." If that's the case, why not just use staff > notation? If the question is why not transcribe lute music into staff notation, the answer is that in transcribing you change the information conveyed. The transcriber must decide note duration (something the composer did not see fit to specify), unless you want to use a staff notation that doesn't specify duration. The transcription also will not tell the player what string and fret to play a note on, unless you want a score cluttered with two numbers for every note; if you're going to do that, you might as well use tablature. > Or is it to help the PLAYERS, not the composers, players who > might have to play many different lutes in different tunings, and who > reasonably can't learn all those fingerboards? All notation is there to assist the performe; the composer knows how the music sounds. The principal of notation that's portable from one size of instrument to another is hardly confined to tablature, BTW. Players of clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, horns and a whole array of other brass instruments learn one set of fingerings and play from transposed parts. > Sorry if this seems obvious, > but to me tab seems to have so much going AGAINST it vis-a-vis staff > notation, Like what? > that there must be one incontestable reason for its survival. It's intuitive and easy to learn, compact, efficient, easy to sightread, tells the player what the player what the player needs to know and allows the player to play an instrument tuned to a pitch the player has never used before as easily as one he's played all his life. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
