>> Someone asked whether a grace note is played on the beat, or ahead of >> the beat. > You know, I've asked this question many times before. Especially when > I first started playing. I think the answer is, at least for me, that > grace notes don't really exist in the same way that they do in classical > music. > When I play grace notes, lopos, cuts, etc.. The grace note & the actual > note are really part of the same space in time.
I think we can be a bit less intuitive than that. I've done quite a lot of tinkering around with tune playback using BarFly, which allows you to decode whether the gracenotes take time from the preceding or following note, and what fraction of a melody note they take up. It still sounds mechanical (and BarFly only lets you set this on a per-tune basis) but you can hear when you've got *some* settings right for *some* of the tune. By and large instrumental pieces played back this way sound better with the time taken from the following note. I think that's consistent with what you're saying here... > You can still keep the beat strong by emphasizing things using the > weight of your bowstroke, the velocity of the bowstroke and the > direction of the bow on a given note. i.e. the gracenote is conceptually part of the attack of the melody note. This is perhaps more obvious with the pipes, where the complex clusters of gracenotes you sometimes get are intended to parallel a drum flam, and for really heavy accents you may throw in a low G simply because that's the noisiest and most dissonant note available. Songs are often the other way round. Song transcribers, including hymn arrangers, use grace notes written after the melody note to indicate that the time is to be taken from the previous note - again, BarFly is quite a handy tool to show you how this works; even playing a simple hymn tune shows you that one way can be idiomatic and the other not. Simon Fraser's slow airs often have grace notes both before and after the melody notes, and I assume that's the distinction he's making. (Pity he didn't write more about the performances he'd heard and less of the historical claptrap). Somewhere in print I once came across a piper pontificating forcibly that the One True Way to play gracenotes in piobaireachd was to place them on the mid-point, taking an equal amount of time from the preceding and following notes. Pipers can be like that. This all sounds like the sort of thing Stuart Eydmann might have tried measuring. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
