On Mon, December 13, 2010 4:40 pm, John Howell wrote: > At 3:49 PM -0500 12/13/10, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: >>How can string players learn a fairly vast repertoire of fingerings, >>positions, and techniques during their careers -- techniques that are played >>just from the "what" on the sheet music -- but for harmonics they have to be >>told "how"? I quit string playing many years ago, so don't know. Are >> harmonics >>not learned as a standard part of professional string development? Players >>don't have a core set of harmonics memorized? Guitarists seem to. > > Point taken. The question comes down to this, I think. String > players certainly do learn how to read and play harmonics. But > composers do not necessarily learn how to notate them properly (as > the present discussion shows!), so yes, there can be ambiguous > notation that needs to be interpreted. Given a choice between > something clear and something that raises questions, I would usually > choose the former.
I'm not arguing that -- Darcy says they're used to seeing this kind of notation. When that sort of comment comes up, I always go to the "Rite". Stravinsky was my 'virtual' orchestration teacher (meaning I learned mostly crap in school), and he used almost only the circle notation in that piece (the exception I've found being at rehearsal 91). But for me THIS 'why' still remains: The diamond notation for harmonics calls for a specific physical action -- that's different from almost any other kind of standard notation, which is metaphorical by telling what it should sound like, not how to accomplish it. Is the lack of migration toward the circle notation just an anomaly that will disappear with time? Like before horns were always transposed up a fifth? Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
