On Oct 22, 2008, at 11:59 AM, Daniel Wolf wrote:
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.
Yup, you are absolutely right. Although in all fairness, most jazz musicians are fairly comfortable with a wide variety of chord notations, which are not really standardised in any case even though guys like me are trying to standardise them. For example, even though I espouse alpha-numeric chord suffixes, I am neither confused nor offended, nor even slowed down to speak of, by Darcy's geometric styles.
Part of the reasoning is that we have to sight read on the gig fairly often, so we have to keep things as simple as possible. Practiced parts have no limits to complexity, of course. I have sometimes gone against my own advice and supplied improvisation instructions that go outside the boundaries of normal chord symbols, just because a certain piece or section of a piece needed something other than a straight-ahead chord symbol. I pick my battles, though!
Voicings are as personal as the player is. In certain styles we find more of one thing than another (making it no different than classical in that way!) and certain things are almost always wrong in certain styles while being "right" in another style, but mostly the "grip" voicings and stock formulae are there just to make things a little simpler for the newbie. Nobody is going to tell Herbie Hancock how to voice something (though Wayne Shorter tried to, with limited success) but a teacher is going to give a student something to practice that is set for the style.
But we are kind of an uptight bunch, it is true. 8-) Christopher _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
