Dear Matanya, Yes, I do seem to be contradicting myself, so perhaps I may elaborate a little. I think a lot depends on how much experience one has with any particular notation. For a complete beginner tablature will be easier to read, because it by-passes the concept of pitch and goes straight to the fingerboard. There are no sharps and flats to worry about. However, with time and lots of playing, those tablature letters acquire a meaning which embraces pitch as well as position on the fingerboard. An experienced player can sing from tablature or (if he is a pianist) play it straight onto the piano. The tuning would have to be a familiar one, otherwise he will be back to square one as a beginner, deducing a position on the fingerboard, but not pitch.
My own experience is that the same thing happens in reverse with staff notation. For a beginner the notes of staff notation represent pitch only, and he has to learn where those notes are on his instrument. Eventually the idea of pitch and position on the fingerboard become so intertwined, that staff notation becomes a sort of tablature. A notation designed to show pitch ends up being one which the player eventually associates with the lay-out of his fingerboard. When I play the tenor viol, I read fluently from the alto clef. Yet if you asked me to read from that clef on the modern guitar, I would struggle, at least to start with, because the notes of the alto clef mean more than just pitch to me. I associate them with the viol fingerboard, and I would get all confused trying to transfer it to the guitar. As you know from previous messages, I believe lute players should be familiar with both staff notation and tablature. The question is, which should a beginner learn first? That's the $64,000 question. :-) Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. > In a previous message, you argued that pitch notation requires two actions > to cause the player to execute the movements required to produce the sound, > i.e., recognition of the pitch and then translating that pitch to the > topography of the fingerboard. Tablature, you said, removes one of these > actions and goes directly to the fingerboard. If this is true, then it > follows that the only time the lutenist gets to hear the pitch, is _after_ > the action has been taken when it is too late to do anything about it. But > this can not be entirely true, if, at the same time, you recognize that it > is possible to hear the pitch directly from the ciphers. In other words, as > far as pitch is concerned, both systems are pretty much the same.
