On May 30, 2009, at 6:33 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Interesting and thoughtful response. Thanks.
In Berlioz' treatise on orchestration, he comments (actually I
think it
was from Strauss when he edited it) that horn players would rather
transpose than read a key signature. Speaking for modern horn
players, I
think most of us (but not all) would disagree with that statement.
But the generation to which he was referring was the one that made the
transition from hand horn to valve horn. For them transposition was
normal
and key sigs were not.
The result is music from a few composers, Struass and Wagner are
examples,
that is more difficult than usual to transpose because it is very
chromatic and the diatonic, general interval methods that work well in
earlier music do not work as well.
Do you think that this is a similar transitional phenomena? Or
maybe one
of those oddities of music notation which continue even though it's
initial purpose is lost in history?
Richard Smith
Honestly, I don't know.
I think parts of the phenomenon might be transitional. For example,
the badly-hand-copied lead sheets that were scrawled on a scrap of
staff paper during a break in rehearsal have given way to badly-
engraved computer pages using the factory defaults and no attention
to layout, collisions, rehearsal letters, or other details, except
all of the noteheads are perfectly formed and the stems all connect
to the noteheads. This means an entire generation of jazz musicians
is being formed without the odd pencil cues and made-up shapes that
everyone in my generation came to take for granted.
Dennis B-K pointed out once in one of his conversations here on the
list (it might even be in his archives on his website somewhere) that
music notation, and thus the music itself, is being shaped now by
Finale, Sibelius and whatever other software might be in common use.
Things that are not easy to accomplish in Finale or Sibelius simply
don't appear in notation very often any more. I would include some
specialised jazz notations among those items, though I think most of
Dennis' argument was based around graphic notation. This means that
the next generation might not want to see a hand-formed jazz turn
(gruppetto) and might not even recognise it, for example. Falls used
to be notated in relative length. Now that there is one, maybe two
lengths of falls in the articulation tool, we won't get that level of
detail much any more.
I think there are some oddities that will continue to be used,
particularly with regards to chord symbol notation. Whether the hand-
copied look will continue to be common, well, maybe that will go away
eventually.
Christopher
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