On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 07:25 AM, Richard Huggins wrote:
That's just the point. YOUR experience, not mine. And to put it another way,
YOUR market, not mine. ("Every player I know...") I disagree with your
evaluation of the impropriety of using vertical chord symbols to mean
alternate bass. But I am unlikely ever to produce charts that you or the
music makers you play with or write for will read, and vice versa, and it
must be said that context means everything. In other words, the issue
differs for the two markets, and one is no more inferior than the other,
just *different.*
I assure you that vertically stacked chords are in fact used by at least one
major segment of choral music publishing, i.e. the evangelical choral
market. In your eyes they may be wrong but that's your eyes. Their market
accepts it as normal. I was an editor for such a publisher and the issue of
polytonal chord symbols never came up.
Fair enough. If that's the convention in your field, then that's the convention. Just so long as you are aware, though, that a pianist or guitarist who is not familiar with the evangelical choral market and its notation conventions will (naturally) assume "polychord" when s/he sees a vertical chord stack, because that's what it means in mainstream popular music and jazz and Broadway and every other genre using chord symbol notation I've ever seen -- with the exception of the genre you mention.
And actually, now that I think of it, I've played piano and arranged horn parts for some gospel choirs here and there, and the music they used all had chord symbols with diagonal slashes, just like a normal pop chart would. So it's evidently not *all* of the evangelical choral market.
- Darcy
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No one likes us I don't know why We may not be perfect But heaven knows we try But all around, even our old friends put us down Let's drop the Big One and see what happens
- Randy Newman, "Political Science"
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