On Mar 26, 2008, at 4:38 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:
I know what he means, if I could jump in here. The listener might
not make a distinction, but the performer reading it might react
differently. In a previous post (I don't know if it made it to the
board yet!) I had made a comparison using jazz, where it is easy to
get eighth notes to swing in 4/4, but hard to get quarter notes to
swing in 4/2 or
Dear Christopher,
Sometime around 1960, Jim Hall wrote a piece for jazz players and
string quartet that was notated in half notes where we would have
expected quarters. It took us all of a minute or two to get used to
it. There is an existing recording (George Shuller has it), and I
defy anyone to hear the notation anomaly. Those things can put a
temporary hitch in the performer's brain, but aural conventions do
(and should) prevail.
Joe Schwantner writes gorgeous music that I find difficult to read (my
limitation - not the notation's) because he makes a point of choosing
small note values; things a jazz musician would expect in quarters and
eighths turn up in sixteenths and 32nds. I don't believe it makes a
bit of difference to those who are used to the convention. It still
sounds something like an orchestration of Bill Evans' most
sophisticated and adventurous playing.
As I said in an earlier email I tried to post (but it didn't come
through, for some reason), nothing significant changed when France
changed 500 francs to 5 francs.
sixteenths to swing in 4/8. Some styles of music enter the
performer's brain more easily in a certain notation, according to
what we are used to. The composer can choose to ignore these
conventions, but he may be putting up a barrier to easy
interpretation of his music.
I agree with this. Schwantner says he wants that barrier, though I
can't, for the life of me, understand why. It does make his music
"look" like complicated "contemporary" music, even if it sounds more
accessible than much of that stuff. Maybe he has something there. He
has certainly had professional success in the contemporary "classical"
community by making his music notation agree with its conventions.
(An interesting exception to the jazz swing convention: the tune All
Blues, which for some odd reason is usually notated in 6/8 with
swing 16ths, rather than the more conventional 6/4 with swung 8ths
(like two bars of jazz waltz). Nutty.)
And now, to contradict myself, my arrangement of this piece is written
in 6/4, because I'd never seen it notated, and that seemed right to
me. Go figure.
Chuck
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Chuck Israels
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