I. Oppenheim writes: | On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Jack Campin wrote: | | > for example, vocal music usually has a separate flag | > for each individual syllable, which looks unreadable | > to a fluteplayer, | | That was indeed the convention in all old vocal music, | but it is no longer so. Most modern editions of vocal | music, group the notes according to the beats of the | measure, to make sight-reading easier.
Again, when I leaf through my motley collection looking for vocal music, I find a more complicated pattern. There may have been a trend away from separated notes in vocal music, but it's hard to see in a mere few dozen books from the past century. One thing I noticed that probably isn't an accident: I have a number of hymnals, and all of them seem to use beamed notes, even the one printed in the 20's. I'd guess that this is because the "market" is mostly people who are musically illiterate and only read the words. The music is read by the accompanist, usually but not always a keyboard player. So it makes sense that the music would be in a form that instrumentalists prefer. I have an edition of Bach chorales, mostly with words, and this also beams the notes. I have a couple of "shaped-note" books, but they use note values so long that eighth-notes are rare. So they're no help in spotting a pattern. In "commercial" music there are clearly few if any rules. Thus, I have a copy of the "Kurt Weill Centennial" collection, published in 1999. All of the songs are printed in the same style, so everything was obviously redone for this edition. It uses the separate-note style in the vocal lines throughout. This may have been to make it look old fashioned, but it's more likely that it was just the rule at that publisher in 1999. In fact, I have a couple of prints of his songs from the 30's, and at least one of them beams the notes in the vocal line. I also have several collections of old European Jewish music that clearly contain reprints of the originals. The dates range from maybe the 1830s to the 1940s or so. The two styles are totally mixed, sometimes within a single song. There's also a common intermediate: Syllables with several notes are beamed, but separate syllables aren't. (When there are two verses with different syllabification, the results are ad hoc.) This tells me that music printers in central and eastern Europe didn't much have rules about such things (or each printer made up their own rules). In any case, we should encourage publishers to eliminate the practice of using separated notes for vocal music. It's a bad practice that doesn't help anyone read the music. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
