Re: A note which is three measures long

[David Kastrup]

Simon Albrecht <address@hidden> writes:

> On 02.09.2017 00:34, David Kastrup wrote:
>>>> Mensural music tends to be a lot less beat-centric (and chord-centric)
>>>> than later music.
>>> I used to think that as well, and many people did, and do. For several
>>> reasons, I don’t anymore:
>>> 1) There’s the „notationskundliche“ (‘notationological’…) aspect,
>>> which I already summarized in this thread: Composers first wrote
>>> scores with barlines and ties on slates, then extracted parts (without
>>> barlines) and erased the score.
>> So?  Engineers use rulers for making technical drawings but that does
>> not mean that you need to glue the rulers to the page or that something
>> not drawn on checkered paper isn't a technical drawing.  Composer
>> tallying tools and execution scores are different things.
>
> But doesn’t it say something important about how the music was thought
> about?

It says that composers were expected to do their job, and that job was
sufficiently different from that of the performers that the visual aids
were different.

> Of course, if e.g. a /soggetto/ in semibreves is imitated starting a
> minima later, the second entry shouldn’t be sung as ‘hard’
> syncopations, but still be sung cantabile and according to word
> stresses.  But my point is that it would be wrong anyway to infer the
> former just from use of bar lines.  (Ultimately, there’s no way around
> being acquainted with the style in order to give a good performance.)

If the visual representation stresses the relation to the metronome at
the cost of the inner structure, the performance will move in that
direction.  That's what typography does.

>> That makes it rather hard for the executioner to bring out the_inner_
>> rhythmic and thematic structure without hanging every note from the
>> rigid meter.
>
> In my experience, the difficulty is rather outweighed by not losing
> any time with singers being confused by lack of bar lines (not to
> speak of the lost sympathies one faces as choral conductor if they
> have difficulty deciphering the rhythms in the first place).

Shrug.  In the choirs I was singing in, we were also expected to deal
with doing chant from square notation.  Sure, it took more time to
practice at first but it resulted in a more pliable flow better fitting
the music than a transcription into note values would have delivered.

It's a matter of priorities.  Your priorities are to get fast
approximations to the music with your singers.

-- 
David Kastrup