On Jul 7, 2005, at 9:47 PM, Neal Schermerhorn wrote:
Owain Sutton wrote:
(7/10, 13/20)
Why? It's easily playable, and it's something that cannot possibly be
notated another way, unlike x/12. And, like it or not, it's found its
way into mainstream notation and publication.
I've never seen it. If I bought a piece of music and I saw 13/20 I
would
have no clue how to interpret it. My best guess would be 13 notes to
the bar
all equal to a quintuplet division of a quarter. Basically 2 sets of 5
sixteenths with a 5 under them, and 3 extra. Am I close?
See? You got it first try!
Seriously, the set of musicians who would even want to think about
timing so
hard to get that even close is small. Much smaller than the
still-small set
of musicians who can play a quintuplet accurately in the first place.
Huh? I'm no wizard, but <I> can certainly play quintuplets accurately,
and have been able to so do since I was seventeen, when I first had to,
and on trombone, yet (it took me about a week to be consistent, but it
was easy from then on.)
My trick was (for 4 sixteenths, a quintuplet, and a quarter note) to
say out loud "TEE-ry tee-ry MATH-e-ma-ti-cal TAH." My nine year old can
do it (I tested it out on him.)
I personally question the value of having such rhythms in music when
there's
plenty of life left in the ones most people can actually play, but
hey, you
write what you like, no problem with me. Still, it sounds more like
architecture or graphic design than composition to me...
And I personally question waiting until every single combination of
quarter notes is used before moving on to use some eighths, which is
what you are saying. There are WAY wackier rhythms than the ones we are
discussing in everyday music (try transcribing just about any R+B
singer, for instance), so don't try pulling that "nobody can play these
rhythms" routine. Sure, they are hard to read. But that's a problem
with our notation system, which came about through monks trying to
remember chants, and is badly set up for notating even moderately
complex rhythms that just about anybody can learn easily by ear.
Christopher
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