At 5:43 PM -0500 1/14/11, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 14 Jan 2011 at 17:11, John Howell wrote:
But the practice goes back to the 13th century and was a necessary one
in music in which barlines were never used. THAT is what makes it
archaic, since using a number automatically makes it a multi-meaure
rest.
I'm about to prepare parts on my Capricornus score (discussed on the
last early last summer), and I have a dilemma -- the multi-measure
rests will include time signature changes, so I'm going to have to
break them up (I assume Finale will do that), but they are long
measures, the standard being 4/2 and with 3/1, 6/2 and 9/2 (though
3/1 and 9/2 occur problematically only as the last measures of
passages in 4/2 or 6/2, so that's relatively simple). I'm intending
to put in multi-measure rests only for the standard meters (4/2 and
3/1) and write out the non-standard measures, and for the ones that
occur at the end of a rest, I'm going to include vocal cues.
I can certainly understand that as an editing dilemma. From what you
say, I assume that the original did not have bar lines, so imposing
your own bar lines--even if mixed meters reflect the music
accurately--means that multi-measure rests would be incomprehensible
if they tried to cross time signature changes. That's why I try to
remove the barlines when I edit, if it's possible to do so without
making things more confusing. But of course Finale (along with
Sibelius and Mosaic) assumes that ALL music is divided into bars, so
various kludges are needed to try to fool them.
At least you're barring to the music, and not to an arbitrary meter
that's imposed on it.
New Music has many of the same problems. It's just that there were
those two centuries of rather rigid meter between then and now.
Which of course led composers like Beethoven and Schubert to rebel
against the "tyranny of the bar line"! Sometimes you just can't win.
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.
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