At 11:58 AM 5/28/03 -0400, Daniel Dorff wrote: >Dennis, I'm new around this list and not familiar with your work, so forgive >me for wondering if I've innocently stepped into an argument in progress?
No, I don't think so. Though the discussion of notational practice with new nonpop comes up quite a bit. >The proportion of composers whose music is not accepted by us is very highly >proportionally male composers too That was parenthetical, but I was surprised at the fairly extreme proportion, which doesn't reflect my experience. This, as I said, is a discussion best left to another time (and, perhaps, place). It's in my consciousness right now because we're broadcasting an interview with Hannah Bosma on Saturday, and her writings (http://www.hannahbosma.nl/) are fairly important on the topic. I'm also thinking about it because of Berio's death; in his & her lives, Cathy Berberian was credited with very little at the level of authorship -- only as performer, and never as co-composer, which she must have been in such works as "Visage." History, I think, will correct that. In any case, another time. I was just surprised, and if that truly represents submissions to you, something is more awry in the publication of new nonpop than I'd thought. >We don't evaluate composers based on whether they have radical notation - >very few composers do these days, and that would be a silly way to decide >important things; after all, Peters simply photographed Crumb's beautiful >manuscripts. I'm wondering whether alternative notation is a specialty of >yours, and I'd love to see it and learn how you get Finale to do radically >alternative notation. It isn't a specialty. I just do it where it's needed. "Where it's needed" appears to be significantly more often than you or James O'Briant would appear to be comfortable with. It could also be that, with the proliferation of self-publishing and Internet distribution (which I use substantially, even though my printed scores are sold through Frog Peak Music), the name-brand publishers are needed mostly for their muscle in schools and other existing organizations, their cachet, and their ability to lift the distribution process off the shoulders of composers as they are more frequently played. So when you say "very few composers so [use radical notation] these days," it might indicate that composers have given up beating on the doors of publishing houses, especially in the U.S. They've been spurned for two generations; why fight it? With Finale and Acrobat and websites, who needs publishers for anything except labor-saving and traditional distribution? (Please take that as said with lightness of voice; think Danny DeVito.) Yes, there's an purpose for publishers, and that's copy editing -- which is really what we're talking about. As an editor of writers, I know that what comes through the door always needs some work. The same is true for much music, but many of us have had to learn to be self-editors or at best share work with colleagues. As a very small publisher of my and three colleagues' scores, I do work with them in the same way you say you do -- though I don't question their notational choices unless they are really confusing to me. Having to learn a new symbol or new technique does not come into that category. I would almost never change beaming, for example. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've dealt with performers who want the same score written differently because of their playing tastes. It's said that if standards weren't important, there wouldn't be so many of them.) I also mentioned house culture, and I think there's a stratification of scoring that goes with that: pop houses, religious scoring farms, film factories, the Ur-everything people, new scores meeting traditional expectations both compositionally and notationally (I'm thinking of Gwyneth Walker, for example, a neighbor whose work I've known for many years, and who is often played), and new scores whose purpose is the break new ground compositionally as well as (more than occasionally) advancing notational development. These latter may really have become a subculture. I was speaking with a composer in Amsterdam last week who spent a summer in the US, and was shocked by the low level of support/interest/cash/whatever in the nonpop business. He said when he returned home to the Netherlands, it "was heaven here". >I also sense having walked into a previous argument with someone else when >you suggest composers caved about notation. That's not at all how I work >with them. No, not a previous argument. But I wasn't sure if, representing a publisher, you were being entirely transparent about the behind-the-scenes discussions that go on. Book editors and writers can come down to screaming matches; you sounded awfully darn polite for someone in that role. :) >The kinds of things I'm talking >about composers allowing us to standardize are conventions like slurs going >over a whole tie rather than going just to the beginning of it Ah, Bill Mayer's style (at your house) and the late Gilles Yves Bonneau's (at mine)! >carelessly spelling a phrase with sharps in >one measure and the same music in flats in the next. Agreed. Basic copy editing there. >The process here is to go from >what the composer writes down hastily making a deadline and eager to get to >the next piece, to what the composer agrees is the best way for performers >to read it. Again, copy editing. But there *is* a subtext in this thread that composers aren't always so much hasty as they simply don't want to bend to someone else's idea of convention -- to their (and their publisher's) detriment. I'm always trying to ferret out that attitude, because bumping up against Finale's limitations is such a pain; I can't imaging publishing houses are more flexible than Finale. The realm of time in Finale (from complex signatures through those doggone fixed barlines) bothers me ... I *hate* to discover myself composing for the program because I know it will resist my compositional requirements. I have to slap my own psyche and say, "do what's musically right, not what 19th century notation expects". Would a publisher ride me up and down for the same behavior? >I think I was being a constructive contributor to the dialog about >composers and house styles I didn't mean to offend at all. Regular list members will know that I am thoroughly intemperate when it comes to someone (in my reading) usurping composers' rights of authorship in any way. I attribute composers with the (so to speak) right of first refusal on any changes, with little discussion if they claim priority of authorship. The nonpop composer's lot remains underplayed, underpaid, underrespected, and generally run over by market forces. I'm a touch sensitive about that. You did notice. :) Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
