On 1 Apr 2006 at 13:51, Andrew Stiller wrote: > On Apr 1, 2006, at 1:04 PM, Phil Daley wrote: > > > Could you make a score of a "rap piece" so that another group could > > perform it and it would be identical to the original performance? > > (By which I mean, the same pitches.) > > Of course one could. Probably has. Which is not to say that there is > not a great deal of non-rap music that cannot be so notated. (Too many > negatives there! What I'm saying is that there is a lot of music other > than rap that cannot be notated clearly enough to allow perfect > duplication of a given performance. "Being for the Benefit of Mr. > Kite" comes to mind.)
The part of Phil's stance about this that bothers me is the privilege it gives to notation. The fact that something is hard to notate precisely does not mean that it's not music. There's quite a lot of jazz that would be extremely difficult to notate because of the rhythmic complexity. There's lots of music that utilizes bent tones that don't fit very well onto our diatonic notation system. Both of these would make notating rap precisely quite difficult. But the issue that really bothers me is the idea that something has to be notatable in a fixed form that allows the work to be recreated in precisely the same form in order for it to be music. That would eliminate the greater bulk of all repertories based on improvisation (of which rap is one). > And I note that you've ignored my percussion-ensemble examples. I thought he asked if different ensembles would sound the same playing from the score. Given that no two identical percussion instruments sound precisely the same, I'd say that it's unlikely that any two performances of Ionisation would sound identical. But the requirement Phil is placing on these pieces is completely arbitrary and if applied honestly would eliminate a lot of the works he considers to be music. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
