At 9:00 AM +0100 1/23/07, Daniel Wolf wrote:
John Howell wrote:
A parallel can be drawn with the figured bass of the 17th and 18th
centuries. (This, by the way, is a no-longer-living language, but
one that served for generations to solve exactly the same problems
that were faced in 20th century pop and jazz.)
I have to object to this. Above and beyond the large number of
contemporary musicians associated with historical performance
practice who have mastered extemporaneous realization of figured
bass accompaniment, figured bass has never left "classical" musical
training, and in some areas, for instance church organists here in
Germany, performance from figured bass has a continuous, unbroken,
tradition.
I knew that as I wrote, of course, but like all matters of historical
performance practice modern players are learning the language of
figured bass as an historical artifact, and the language is NOT
changing in the present.
As I've written here before, figured bass has one great advantage
over vernacular chord symbols: by notating the intervals over the
bass, the full content of the chord is indicated umambiguously.
I would not agree 100% with this. Both figured bass and chord
symbols indicate all the notes, but never the voicing, at least not
for the best players of either.
What figured bass does not do is indicate functions, and I suspect
that a large portion of the problem with vernacular practice is a
confusion between the need to indicate the pitch content and a
desire to locate the chord functionally, thus the continued
discussions over whether a chord should be labeled x or y.
I believe you're entirely correct. We must remember that both
figured bass and chord symbols are intended for performance and not
for analysis. One major difference is that in figured bass notes
altered from the key signature must be so labeled, while in chord
symbols the symbols are absolute and independent from the key
signature. But neither was ever intended for theory analysis, which
is an entirely different process.
This is problematic on several accounts, the first being that musics
of all sorts delight in functional ambiguity, and the second that
the analysis, the labeling, is introducing a second level of
abstraction into the notation. If the idea is to make reading more
fluent and playing more fluid, then one would presumably prefer to
be free of an additional abstraction.
Exactly. And my suggestion was that making chord symbols that
emphasize the extensions rather than the basic chords creates exactly
that kind of abstraction.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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