In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Christopher BJ Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>At 1:17 PM -0400 7/12/04, John Howell wrote: >>Pardon me for stating the obvious, but those signatures are >>meaningless. We do not have a "10th" note or a "24th" note in our >>notational system, > > >We sort of do. In a dectuplet (ten eighths in the space of 8 eighths) >the logical way to call one of the tuplet notes is a "tenth note", it >being slightly faster than an eighth note. If there was a passage >where bar 1 was 4/4 filled with dectuplets, then the composer wanted >two more OF THE SAME VALUE in the second measure, followed by a >downbeat in the third measure, then I might be tempted to notate that >second bar as 2/10 as being the clearest way to illustrate what I >mean to sound. The equivelant 1/5 as a time signature, while perhaps >more truthful, would not be as clear in the example I gave. > >I don't often DO that, but I realize that some composers need those tools. My wife says you can't argue with how a composer thinks, but with my composer's hat on I would try very hard to avoid this notation. In this situation, I presume earlier bars had straight eighths and the dectuplets indicate precisely how much faster the new notes go than the old ones. If this is the reason, it could be indicated by a "Poco piú mosso" marking with "new EEEEE = old EEEE" (E = eighth note) beside it, and a new time signature of 5/4 or 10/8. In many circumstances this would save a chunk of rehearsal time. I realise that the "new" notation is pretty much parallel to the pre- 1600 convention that a perfection sign indicates that three breves add up to one long, which I would be happy to sing or play (at about 200 breves to the minute), but the difference is that there are thousands of works with the latter convention, so if you perform this sort of music you meet it fairly soon and can get lots of practice. >And by the way, these forms of time signatures were spelt out by Henry >Cowell, in "New Musical Resources". In 1919. Do you have any idea how many times they have been used since? They don't seem to have caught on to any great extent. -- Ken Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web site: http://www.mooremusic.org.uk/ I reject emails > 100k automatically: warn me beforehand if you want to send one _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
