On 8 Jul 2005 at 7:39, Ken Durling wrote: > 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.
Well, standard metronomes don't have 69 as a setting, but the original marking was 60.75, not 69.75. The difference between 60.75 and 61 in a piece of 100 measures is 0.026985090737367604398569790191362 minutes, or 1.6191054442420562639141874114817 seconds: 100 measures of 4/4 is 400 beats. beats per minute time (minutes) 60.75 6.5843621399176954732510288065844 61 6.5573770491803278688524590163934 Difference: 0.026985090737367604398569790191362 in seconds: 1.6191054442420562639141874114817 So, basically, you're talking about less than 2 seconds difference in a 100-measure piece, if it's performed with absolutely metronomic regularity. My guess is that "69.75 pushed slightly" is going to yield something substantially faster than 70. I don't think we are wired to perceive such tiny differences. I think it would even take 5-10 or more measures of these two tempos played simultaneously before we'd even notice the difference. And I doubt that anyone could tell you which was which just be listening to them. > 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 don't see what double decimal point precision of tempo markings accomplishes in that regard. > 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. I can't see any obvious meaning to 60.75. -- 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