Many thanks for the interesting responses so far in this thread. As
expected, most of the information, while reasonable and with some
practical experience behind it, is rather informal. e.g.
— accidentals should be clearly distinguished, particularly sharps and
naturals;
— serif fonts are more readable (a familiar conclusion from text font
research);
— players tend to read signs (e.g. hairpins or stacatto marks) more
reliably or faithfully than words (e.g. cresc., dim., stacc.)
The relationship and proportion of black marks to white page seems, in
particular, to be a serious issue. This, like serifs, is familiar from
text studies. I do wonder if there are additional layout issues from
which a glance at text research might be useful, for example, the
avoidance of "rivers" of white space through a page. However, I have
observed that there seems to be a real connection between repertoire and
preference on this issue. For example, musicians playing Broadway shows
seem to prefer a commercial "ink pen" style with relatively little black
to white, while opera pit parts tend to be more compact, minimizing page
turns and the net number of pages. While there may be some musical issues
leading to this — musicals use flexible items like vamps and the music is
in numbers, not through-composed — the physical circumstances of playing
in the pit (little space, less light) are very similar, and moreover, the
opera parts tend not only to be more detailed, but it is expected that the
details be attended to, which ought to go against the dense notation
style. So I'm led to the expectation that the differences are more of
habit than of efficiency. I'd like to seem some more concrete tests of
this.
As an aside, I must admit to finding yet another discussion of vernacular
chord notation somewhat puzzling. While, in principle, the intention would
appear to be to create a notation for rather flexible extemporaneous
realization, in practice, the usage prefered by one player or another
tends to be voiced in a rather doctrinaire way (i.e. always this, never
that; this is right, that is wrong). I suspect that these are closely
tied to particular traditions and schoold, but I don't know enough to sort
them out. Coming, personally, from a classical background — which one
would suspect to be more doctrinaire, but is in fact one in which
musicians tend to be comfortable with a number of notations for both
harmonic analysis and performance, some of which have the virtue of little
ambiguity (continuo bass figures), others of which are interpretive and
often contradictory (functional notation, scale step (Stufen) notation,
combined scale step/functional notation etc.) — this discussion is fairly
startling.
Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt
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