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 <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. > 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. _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
