Re: OT: Vocal music

[mike]

On Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:52:26 +0100 (CET), Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > I'm working on a book of madrigals right now and some of it is
> > recorded.  The YouTube excerpt has affinities w/ mm. 21-30 of the
> > attached PDF & audio file (it's an excerpt from the 3rd madrigal in
> > the book, called "Lucky Wok (star!)").
>
> Your sample sounds really amazing!  However, the notation is 
> extremely
> complicated: I've listened five times to it, but I still wasn't able
> to follow the score...

There's the rub...

Obviously, if I gave this score to 10 highly-skilled amateur chamber 
choirs and said "have at it," I would get 10 very different versions of 
the piece and probably none of them would resemble the recording 
(whether or not they'd be better is another question).  However, if I 
put more vague indications like "freak out in the style of Mike 
Solomon," while this would probably get a better initial result 
(assuming the person took the time to research how I freak out), it 
would max out at a lower level of interesting nuance and unexpected 
concord.

If you listen to each voice solo-ed out with a click track, you'll see 
that the recording is pretty much a sonic carbon copy of the notation.  
The best way to learn the piece, then, is to learn it by ear as you read 
it on a beat-by-beat basis.  After rehearsing it this way, the score the 
acts as a timeline with various landmarks to jog your muscle memory.


> Any chance to make it more simple?  Obviously,
> you know far too much about lilypond to produce such well looking
> scores :-)

I <3 LilyPond (that's why I try to break it so often), and I shudder to 
think what putting this together would have been like with any other 
notation program.

Cheers,
MS