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Re: A note which is three measures long
From: |
Simon Albrecht |
Subject: |
Re: A note which is three measures long |
Date: |
Sat, 2 Sep 2017 01:03:29 +0200 |
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? The division of a piece in tempora always scans (in the sense of
‘a verse scans’) in this kind of music – it’s a revolution when e.g. in
Monteverdi (Lamento d’Arianna) it doesn’t anymore.
2) One can equally argue that, without barlines, performers have to
think_more_, not less about the tactus, than if they were written.
Sure, until things fall into place. But if you have a polyrhythmic
situation and a voice gets shifted by a quarter, you don't want to hack
its inherent rhythm into unrecognizable pieces just to make it better
sight-readable for musicians refusing to practise. It loses its_inner_
structure in that manner.
That situation you describe sounds more like 20th century than like 16th
century to me.
3) IMO much 19th-century music is hardly different from much
16th-century music in that the real intrigue is in the suspense
created by stresses against the tactus; if the tactus is not present
at all, this suspense gets lost.
The "tactus" in mensural music is far less absolute. If a theme is
shifted by a quarter note in a voice in mensural music and you hear it
without the others, the shift will be hardly if at all perceptible
because you_don't_ stress it "against the tactus" but rather keep its
place in reference to the other voices. In 19th century music, the
metric relation will usually still hit you in the face, and that is
reflected in the notation.
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.)
4) It is an important virtue (for a large part of ‘classical’
repertoire) to make the music not sound as if encaged in equal
cages. So performers need to learn making music/in spite of/ the bar
lines anyway.
It's not just the bar lines but also hacking durations into tied pieces
at_every_ metric division.
Which is why I dislike editions of e.g. Schütz placing barlines after
the semibreve instead of after the breve (the latter being done in the
first scientific edition by Spitta, the former e.g. by the Stuttgarter
Schütz-Ausgaben of Hänssler/Carus).
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). Now you could
argue that this means adapting the music to reading habits stemming from
19th century repertoire, but that’s ignoring the authentic practice of
16th century Partitur.
Best, Simon