At 12:58 PM 6/29/05 -0400, David W. Fenton wrote: >Why would anyone use a 6 for 3 beats?
All of this discussion presumes that the barlines are not visual placeholders. The evolution of music in the past half-century has included substantial visual barring, where notes are grouped for their ease of reading and the barlines and time signatures are peripheral to the metrical progress, even if they may remain helpful to the sense of the note lengths. In the case of 6/4, the visual placeholder may fall for one, a few, several, many or all 'measures' where the note arrangement is dominated by clusters of six quarter notes, even if the same 6/4 measures also contain, say, three half notes, 4 dotted quarters, numerous tuplets, and eighth-quarter-dottedhalf-quarter-eighth symmetries, with no duple or triple beating implicit. Analysis or a score notation is needed due to the absence of a reasonable fallback solution that doesn't carry beat implications. But sometimes saying the barlines are merely visual doesn't help much at performance time. I have an example. A quintet I wrote about a decade ago contained no barlines because the lines were long and irregular phrases without traditional rhythmic verticalities. The performers found it difficult to rehearse, and asked if I could add regular barlines to help them find their way. I was reluctant, but ultimately created a barred score (dashed barlines) so they could rehearse more easily. The result was music played with syncopations where there were none -- because now that the musicians had barlines, they acted as if those barlines had rhythmic meaning. Grim. Performers of early music transcriptions fall into syncopations where the melodic line doesn't shoehorn into post facto divisions, but I leave that argument to the experts. Suffice it to say that there are some bizarre performances of "Ma Bouche Rit"... :) Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
