On 22 Jun 2004 at 16:14, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > However, I learned first from Dr. Roger Nixon, and had this lesson > reinforced by many editors, professors, conductors and so on, that no > one can learn everything. I have become selective. I established > certain personal standards that I use to evaluate new music. If you > want me to consider your new music or new editions, then you must meet > my evaluation criteria. Most importantly, I want to see the notation > reflect your knowledge of the singers' needs AND traditions.
Well, if you actually want to train your singers on how to be performers, they need to be familiar with a number of notational conventions and be able to work through them. Restricting your group to editions of a certain kind is doing them no favors -- it's like limiting a piano student to playing nothing but studies. And when performers develop the skills to cope with different notational traditions, it generally makes them more reliable performers overall. Second, the notational traditions often are intimately connected to the musical style. This is so much the case that I can't accurately play or sing certain kinds of 16th- and 17th-century music from editions that reduce the note values. If an edition is from that period and is notated in 3/4 and has 16th notes, then it's going to greatly confuse anyone who is accustomed to the music of the period. The edition is also going to run into problems if there are multiple sections to the piece in different meters that have relationships to each other. The original notation (or when the original has the whole note as the beat, halved notation) is more appropriate to the musical style, and I believe performers would be better served by learning flexibility than by needing to depend on the crutch of specially prepared editions, whether the special features of the edition are in clefs, time signatures or syllabification. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
