On 9/26/07, Kieren MacMillan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello all, > > It's not nearly as slick as "tuplet"... but how about "rhythmic ratios"? > The phrase sums up almost precisely what it represents, and would be > (I imagine) VERY easily translated. > > Just my 2 cents Canadian (which is about the same as 2 cents American > nowadays!)
Yes, it is, isn't? And paying for hotel rooms (and beers) in Europe is getting downright prohibitive ... There's another (English) term out there that I don't like but that will translate directly into FR, ES and the other Romance languages: "irrational rhythm". I've avoided bringing it into this thread before because I personally disagree with it. But it is now used regularly in English. See, for example, the (English) wikipedia articles for each that suggests that perhaps the entry for "tuplet" and "irrational rhythm" should merge. You can find examples of Ferneyhough using the term (I can google if anyone cares). And there's also a passage in one of Balint Andras Varga's interviews with Xenakis where the two of them discuss the term. Xenakis has 9:5 type stuff all over his music, of course, and in one of the interviews in Varga's book, Varga asks Xenakis where these rhythms come from. And Xenakis's first response is "Why do people call those rhythms irrational? They're actually very rational." By which I think Xenakis is pointing to the fact that these rhythms are inherently made of *ratios* (whatever in the time of whatever) and so belong to the set Q of rational numbers; these rhythms definitely do *not* belong to the set *irrational* numbers. My objection is on the same basis: a good term for these rhythms *would have* been "rational rhythms" ... but, for better or for worse, the term "irrational rhythm" seems to be sticking (in English at least). (My hunch here -- which is only that -- is that the term sticks because players sometimes find the rhythms hard ... and so "irrational" points to "difficulty" more than to the mathematical set of numbers to which the rhythms belong. But who knows.) So, there's that. It's available. And although I don't personally like it because I think it's counter-descriptive, it will at least translate readily to those languages that simply cannot backform something like "tuplet". FWIW, I would *much* prefer "tuplet" in our English docs; I would only propose "irrational rhythm" where the translators are coming up empty in the other languages. -- Trevor Bača [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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