Daniel Wolf wrote:
I have a general aesthetic question for people involved in bands. Is there a rationale beyond the pedagogical for wanting band scores to meet some prescribed contemporary and standardized instrumentation? Might there not be some legitimate musical reasons for omitting certain instruments or requiring others, or for allowing or disallowing optional doublings or playing cue note? If someone has articulated a case for a particular standard for band instrumentation, I'd certainly be interested in reading it.
At least in the U.S. the vast majority of bands are educational in purpose -- band directors don't want (and for behavior and discipline they CAN'T have) students sitting idle for large amounts of rehearsal time.
The next largest number of bands are college/university bands -- many (most?) colleges have more than one band, some with as many as 3 or 4 (or more) where the "lowest" level band is really an extension of high school band and is open without audition to any student (or faculty member in many cases) to come participate in. As such, they don't want people who are there as a hobby to feel their time is being wasted by being told that they can't play for several works on the next concert. The upper level bands would be far more likely to program works which add extra instruments and/or omit some instruments, since the members are there by invitation (after passing an audition) to begin with.
Then there are the community bands, where people come once a week (in most cases) to relax by making music in a band environment. Tell them they can't play for part of a concert and they'll go find another band where they're more needed.
Doublings (or cues) are desirable so that band works are performable by more ensembles which might not have the original instruments those passages are scored for -- this allows many bands to perform works which otherwise they would have to pass on, selling more copies for the composer and making the performances more diverse.
It's an entirely different world from orchestras, where everybody except the strings knows there will be works they aren't needed for, and they accept that gladly in exchange for the privilege of performing orchestral music.
Two very different worlds, bands and orchestras, with two very different views of who should play and when.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
