At 10:18 PM -0500 12/12/10, Aaron Sherber wrote:
But isn't that an advantage of just using the circle notation? It indicates to the player the desired pitch and the fact that it should be a harmonic, and leaves the details to the player.
Boy, is that ever a hard question to answer! Let me put it this way: It's impossible to do just one thing, whether you're talking about medicine, engineering, or music. Playing a stringed instrument involves an incredible variety of contrary physical motions and physical controls in order to make the pretty notes come out (which is why beginners sound so bad!), and doing something that seems quick and easy and effective to YOU might jack up the difficulty level of what you're asking for to a level that makes it unplayable by any but the very best players. And that's fine, if it's what you intend to do and you really need the effect, but kind of a shame if you do it without knowing it.
Showing the sounding pitch does NOT, ever, tell the playing how to produce that sounding pitch, with the obvious exception of a number of natural harmonics that we've been seeing for years. It therefore throws the player into an intellectual mode, where we have to stop and figure out how to produce it. And that takes time, which a symphony player will have, but a gigging player will not.
And the intellectual mode also includes translating the stack of ledger lines (which we are used to seeing, but NOT used to seeing for artificial harmonics) into a pitch and an octave, then backtracking to the possibilities of producing that pitch and octave, and finally integrating the necessary fingering and bowing into what comes immediately before and immediately after. And again, a symphony player will have time for all that, but a gigging player will not.
So I guess I'm advocating the principal of KISS: Always choose notation that tells the player exactly what to do, or comes as close as possible given the limitations of our notational system. Do not deliberately erect roadblocks to quick and easy interpretation. (And I would generalize that to the use of either long "phrase markings" or no bowings at all in string parts, although we are used to ignoring what's written when it was obviously marked badly by a non-string player.)
John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:john.how...@vt.edu) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
