At 12:06 AM -0400 4/15/11, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 14 Apr 2011 at 20:52, mu...@rgsmithmusic.com wrote:
Please consider just writng in out. Repeat pattens, especially
complicated and nested types, are a holdover from the days when
everything had to be copied out by hand. Copy and paste routines of
modern notation software have pretty much eliminated the need for
repeats. Your musicians will probably be grateful to play straight
through rather than have to keep track of a complicated "road map".
Sure they can do it and, if they're good, the performance will not be
weak "at the seams". Why not just let them concentrate on making
really good music rather than finding their way.
Whenever this subject comes up, I always chime in to point out that
repeats also serve an analytical purpose -- they tell the player
"this is not new music -- it's EXACTLY the same thing you played
before". When you write it out, you're hiding that fact.
I have to agree with BOTH viewpoints, because there is no single
hard-and-fast rule that always works.
Writing out the repeats in standard-form marches would be just plain
silly, although some of the modern editors of classic marches have
done just that, primarily to earn a new copyright but also to print
the parts on normal-sized paper instead of the Quickstep original
size and in some cases to incorporate performance practice ideas that
were not evident in the original publications. There was a good
reason for that ultra-small Quickstep format for marching musicians,
and the format dictated the use of repeats, DCs, DSs, and other
"tricks of the trade," but any junior high school musician learned to
read and play them.
But the moment they spread those parts out past 2 pages, they
introduce new page turns, and we've played some that are NOT laid out
with good page turns simply because the music never stops! And that
is the tradeoff whenever one adopts the "never use repeats because
the computer makes it easy to copy and paste" approach. You are
trading more paper for more page turns, and that IS an important
consideration. If your music fits on 2 pages, or on 3 with the 3rd
taped on, fine. If it doesn't, you have to deal with page turns.
And the warning (well considered!) not to require a page turn back
for a DC or DS is just as important as the need to lay out good page
turns in the first place.
The same thing applies to any standard musical form, including the
minuet (from which the standard march form seems to have descended)
and the French Rondeau form (once you understand the roadmap). And
in the standard forms that do use repeated sections it IS handy to
know where you are and when it's time for something new.
And it also gives the band leader the option of deciding whether or
not to take the repeats, which in some late 18th and early 19th
century music seem to have been inserted as a pro forma division
rather than as a "must-do" repeat. (This is periodically argued on
the OrchestraList, with some strong opinions expressed but with no
real answer ever offered.) But it just stands to reason that if
you're actually playing a dance piece for dancing, you might want to
insert more repeats to turn a 2-minute minuet or waltz into a
6-minute dance piece. Handel's Water Music, on the other hand, has a
lot of extra repeats in some of the movements, because he was no
dummy and knew that he had to keep the music rolling while the barges
drifted on the Thames, and those repeats aren't needed in a modern
concert performance!
But even with all that said, there's a point of no return. Strauss
waltzes and polkas are full of nested repeats (in the originals), and
difficult to read if you aren't used to them. And the day I lost an
hour in rehearsal after saving 10 minutes of copying I swore off
using complex nested repeats from then on!
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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