On 29 Jun 2005 at 13:28, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: > 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. . .
Yes. I was going from Darcy's remark of 6/4 as meaning 3 beats, which I find incomprehensible. But I do understand that 6/4 is sometimes used as a "least common denominator" meter for music that shifts around. But it seems to me that it's used in contrast to 3/2 specifically to avoid the implication of an underlying triple pulse. > . . . 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. The problems are exactly the same in Renaissance music. That was why Mensurestrich was invented, but, like your dashed bar lines, it is only partially successful. > 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"... :) In my viol consort, we are constantly struggling to free the meter of the individual lines from the metrical notation of the editions we are playing from. Players experienced in this style of music can get very good at it, so that the non-aligning downbeats don't sound like syncopations but like displaced downbeats. Unfortunately, in my experience, the professional early music crowd when performing this music either does the syncopation thing, as you describe, or plays the thing with so little life that you hear neither displaced downbeats nor syncopations. The group I play in strives for something much more lively and interesting, while not doing the syncopated thing. We don't always succeed, because we just don't have full mastery of our instruments. I had thought that this (all on one line): http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/ThisMerryPleasantSpring/06-Bevin Browning - The leaves be green.mp3 was a case of us getting it right, but it seems that the displaced downbeats end up sounding like syncopations to me (two passages, one at c. 1:33, with displaced 3s in quarters in 2 parts against a regular 3 in half notes the other part, and the other at c. 2:15, with displaced 3s in half notes). It didn't *feel* that way playing it, but that's certainly what it sounds like listening to it. Another later performance that is actually musically superior, but technically not as strong (and a very bad source recording): http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Musick-Musik/02-Bevin Browning -The leaves be green.mp3 shows that we had gotten better in making music out of the piece (which is, I think, more interesting to play than to listen to), but had lost our technical security in the harder parts (especially the displaced 3/4 section). So, many times, what one feels internally doesn't come out right. I do agree that rhythmic notation often works against the flow of what is intended. That's why in early music we learn to play from original notation, which in many cases did *not* have bar lines. But then it becomes very difficult to prepare the music, as it's a lot more work to coordinate the parts. But in my experience, it is worth it, especially to get around the tie-across-barlines problem, which really exacerbates the syncopation tendency in performers. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
