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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/19/2011 in all areas

  1. Perhaps. But it depends upon what kind of music you regularly perform, and what sources you use to perform it. I have had to perform Baroque music on period instruments, reading rare works from facsimiles of 17th Century parts because no modern editions were available; sometimes, if there is more than one viola part, the second viola is written in tenor clef - tricky, but you learn fast when you have no choice. Also, early choral/vocal scores almost invariably make use of C-clefs for the soprano, alto and tenor parts, and again, modern editions are not always available. For example, Florilegium recorded a series of CDs they called "Bolivian Baroque," performing all the works presented from scores and parts that had been preserved in the archives of Jesuit Missions for 250 years; there were no other sources readily available, particularly for the works written by the missionaries and natives themselves, so they had no choice but to read the music as it had been notated. The use of C-clefs in vocal music was standard practice well into the Classical era; check out the Neue Mozart Ausgabe, and you'll find that even ol' Wolfi was a traditionalist about this, though the printed scores have been transcribed into modern clefs for ease of study. My experience has been that it's best not to dismiss such things out-of-hand as obsolete and therefore useless. I am at present trying to master Medieval and Renaissance notational conventions, because in my line of work, you never know when you might need to use them.
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  2. I think it's too simplified to just say "scores have to be transposed". That depends on several circumstances. But let's go through things to consider in order of importance: 1. Whatever you do, concert pitch or transposed, the first and most important thing is to clearly write it on top of the first score page. A conductor should be easily able to deal with both concert pitch or transposed scores. What a conductor can not be supposed to silently accept however is having to spend half a hour trying to figure out whether the score is in concert pitch or transposed. In doubt, more information is preferable to less information, when it comes to such central things. 2. Ask the conductor. If you have a conductor who is willing to perform the piece, ask what she or he prefers. There are many different preferences, depending on the style of music, the country you're living in, etc. 3. If you don't have a planned performance for your piece and thus can't ask the conductor, decide for yourself, but optimally (if you're writing the piece on a computer) lay it out in such a way that you can still change it around if needed. Personally, I write all my scores in concert pitch, with the exception of arrangements, which are often kept transposed. I do this after discussing the matter with several conductors, many of which affirmed that they preferred transposed scores for tonal music, whereas concert pitch was preferred for music without a clear tonal centre. This has, of course, some reasons: In traditional, tonal music it is generally very easy to transpose voices mentally to get an idea of how the whole piece sounds. If a horn has a written "C" in a Haydn symphony, that will in most cases mean: "tonic!" There is thus a very direct correlation between harmonic function and the notes you see written in the transposed score. Furthermore, it allows you to see the instrumental ranges more clearly, and spot which notes are going to cause more problems due to high/low pitch etc. In a piece that has nothing to do with common practice tonality, the situation changes somewhat, and even more so the more it moves away from equal temperament and traditional instrumental techniques and notation. In a highly complex Ferneyhough score, no conductor will actually follow an individual voice precisely when conducting, since there's simply too much information to take in. Instead, he will focus on larger things. Keeping everyone together. Watching the dynamic balance and overall timbre, etc. Additionally, you might have many instruments playing in unusual ranges. And microtonal harmonies. And so on. Transposing -that- stuff on the fly for several instruments at once is something no conductor is likely to enjoy. Here, the conductor will generally want to see as quickly as possible the overall density in the various registers, for which a concert pitch score is usually the best choice. But as I said, in the end it comes down to individual preference on the conductor's part, as well as to local customs. (P.S. Take note however. Even if you write a concert pitch score, instruments that play in a different octave than they sound are still transposed. A contrabass will still be written an octave "too high", and a piccolo an octave "too low", etc. It is generally advised to write this, too, at the top of your score if you write in concert pitch.) P.S. Hi guys!
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  3. So, so summarize, we can do whatever the #*$& we want and it will still be considered "good" music because you can't judge what's good and what's bad about it because you can't know my feelings that I'm experiencing while writing/listening to the music. Well if that's the case why don't we just shut down the site now? No one can make a legitimate judgement against any music if we follow the criteria you lay out above. And yet, you make judgments on music all the time. So where's the disconnect here? I have real problems with this post-modernist idea of "its good only according to me" simply because not everything is subjective. The reason we have identified masterworks and master composers is because we can *objectively* say that they are better music than others. Whether you like their music personally, you cannot deny that composers like Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, or Bartok had very finely-crafted music. People make judgments that their music is better than others based on the objective analysis of their music. Do we really want to put Rebecca Black and Radiohead at the same level?
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