Re: A note which is three measures long

[Graham King]

David, Simon,
forgive me: a quirk of my email reader has hidden this fascinating
exchange until now.  Here are a few thoughts:

On Sat, 2017-09-02 at 01:20 +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> 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.
> 
This is a familiar theme, and much depends upon the experience of the
singers.  A little while ago, I had the privilege of singing Giaches de
Wert's 6-part motet "Ascendente Jesu in naviculam" with a group of
friends from facsimile[1].  The motet tells the story[2] of Jesus
calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and uses techniques that in a
later era would be thought of as vivid word-painting (indeed, as a
seafarer, I recognise very specific sea-states there).  The storm scene
is a stupendous multiple canon at the semiminim, preceded by a short
section in which _all_ the parts are displaced from the tactus (the
piece is in tempus imperfectum) by a semiminim.  Having subsequently
sung the same piece from a modern edition[3] with a different amateur
group, I'm really not sure what style of modern notation would help
most.  Perhaps most singers detach their minds from the beat for the
duration of that section.  I certainly have a pair of Stravinsky-moments
each time I approach it!

How I _wish_ that Lukas Pietsch's work on mensural notation in
Lilypond[4] were published and usable!  Then we could offer a real
choice (and set Solesmes chant notation too, where needed).

-- Graham

[1] Harmoniae miscellae cantionum sacrarum (Typis Gerlachianis,
Nuremberg, 1583) available at: http://imslp.org/wiki/Harmoni%C3%
A6_miscell%C3%A6_cantionum_sacrarum_(Lechner,_Leonhard)
[2] Matthew 8:23-26
[3] Email me if you'd like the lilypond source and/or PDF.
[4] See
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2016-05/msg00212.html
for current status, AFAIK.