Simon Albrecht <simon.albre...@mail.de> 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 _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
