At 03:37 AM 7/8/2005, you wrote:
Because a serious musician can set a metronome to 80 and at least try to make an attempt to follow that tempo, while nobody has a metronome that I've ever seen which will give a 69.75 tempo so nobody can even try to follow it, even if they want to.
No but often we ask ourselves or others to "lay back" on a beat, or to "push" it slightly without actually altering the basic pulse. Maybe this is a way to try and notate that. Set your metronome to 69 and lean on it ever so slightly.
On the other hand, and this has probably been mentioned, I've read that B.F. is more concerned with the *effect* produced by a virtuoso musician essaying some of these "extreme" effects, than their absolute accuracy. And, one is not to read that as " he doesn't really care how it sounds" - the effect (of intensity) will only result if you make a concerted effort. I think it's a response to the prevalence of the virtuoso tradition, a sort of "that will give them something to do." We want to hear the result of the interaction.
I once saw a performance of a piece that involved 5 players all with headphones listening to the same source tape; the idea was that they all improvised in response to it, while the audience could not hear the source, just the combination of five different responses to it. When I first became aware of what Ferneyhough was doing it reminded me of this experiment. The response to the score is the piece.
Ken _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
