On 29 May 2003 at 17:50, Christopher BJ Smith wrote: > We wind/piano players are looking for a way to show string players > that a long line should NOT have an audible break between bows. Macro > slurs are the most intuitive way, I suppose. Or what about breaking > the phrase, but keeping the bow moving in the same direction? A macro > slur showing this can help.
Well, I'm a piano player and a viol player, and I *like* audible breaks between bows. They are the natural way for stringed instruments to sound. The idea that everything should be as legato as possible as the default is a spurious one, in my opinion, and applies to virtually no actually historical musical style that I can think of. And legato or connected or slurred is not by any means the only way of making a phrase hold together. It's all about all sorts of things, including accentuation of some notes, dynamic diminution of others, and articulation of the attacks and ends of particular notes. This was taught to me by my first organ teacher who disabused me of the always-legato idea of organ playing in my first lesson by asking me to play a chorale tune with one finger. Turned out I could actually make quite an interesting phrase that hung together very well without a single two notes actually being connected in the conventional sense of legato. Tragically, there are lots of organists who've never learned this lesson, and therefore, their playing is so dreadfully boring as to be a complete snooze! I think there's a similar problem among string players who put too much emphasis on the idea of having absolutely no silence between notes, without worrying sufficiently about the relative weight of the individual notes. In any event, I think there's too much of an idea among the string players I know that they need to disguise the nature of the way in which they make the notes happen, that they are supposed to *hide* bow changes. Well, if a bow change breaks a musical idea, yes, you should try to hide it. But it if actually *reinforces* the musical idea, it's bloody foolish to try to suppress it. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
