John, They couldn't. ;-) Somewhere in my readings I came across the remark by a theoretician of Philippe de Vitry's generation to the effect that "the ancients" (by which he means the Notre Dame and "Petronian" composers) "used to spend hours arguing about whether a note should be sung long or short"(!) In other words: although having the advantage of knowing the style of the music, they were not seldom just as stumped as we are today by the broken patterns of modal notation. Eric ************************************************ Habsburger Verlag Frankfurt (Dr. Fiedler) www.habsburgerverlag.de eric.f.fied...@t-online.de e.fied...@em.uni-frankfurt.de ************************************************
On 15.01.2011, at 03:08, John Howell wrote: > What *I* marvel at is that anyone could sightread the previous rhythmic modes > ... _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
