Re: Metric accents of 4-time


The problem is that without proper descriptions, pro musicians will not
be able to play musical style they were not born into. With good
descriptions, they increase the chance of becoming good students.

Poppy***! Musicians learn from listening. You don't have to have any
descriptions and they actually get in the way. Good students in music
learn the simple notation that we have. It is very simple. It can be
learned in a day or two at most. The rest is learning how to make
music.



Take the Viennese waltz, for example, were I gave a suggestion of what
might be going on. A musician might try this out to make a first good
approximation without a description, it would be much harder.

If this suggestion does not work, one can try making a better one.

And this could be combined with a notation for it.

Again Poppy***! Try giving some verbal examples to someone that does
not know the style and you will get all kinds of wrong applications.
Let a musician hear it and it is learned (by the good ones) in an
instant. And if there was a notation for it, it would be either
something that is specific to that one instance and it would still be
inexact unless you devise a method of notation that would
revolutionize notation as we know it and then be able to make it
understandable to all the musicians. Any ideas here?



It still not the real thing, but the real thing may be inaccessible for
various reasons.

I don't know about parsing this, but if there is no one around that
knows what it should sound like, then I suppose that if you had a
description of what it was supposed to sound like, then each person's
interpretation could arguably be the correct way with each one having
a different way of playing it. Who would be there to say which is
right?


Modern algebraic notation started off by describing it in words only.
like "add the first unknown quantity to the second unknown quantity",
which eventually became the modern notation "x + y".
So if one starts off by describing things like the quoted above in
words, and develops shorthands, that evolves into notation.

Really? I would think that the person that said "the first unknown"
will be represented by X and the second by why and the word add (or
and) will be represented by + and we will call write the symbol = to
mean equal is more of what happened.

I cannot parse this, but originally, one did not use symbols, but words.

Parse it? Why would you want to. If you want to study parsing things,
watch the Bernstein lectures at Cambridge where he compares parsing
music with parsing poetry. BUT in this case, you have understood it
perfectly. At first it was written in words. then the words were
converted into symbols. Just like a word problem in elementary school.
The words pose a specific problem that will follow a set of operations
that will lead to the conclusion. That is not the same thing as music.
Music is more of a short cut way to describe the events of pitch occur
as expressed by specific notes occurring at a specific time. This is
not the case either in language or in Algebra.


I don't see a real similarity
with music. True, music is a descriptive that takes sounds and
converts them into symbols, but there are no operatives in music like
there are in Algebra. If you want to stretch the point, I suppose that
repeat signs could be called an operative, or a D.C.al Fine, but
Algebra is a defining operatives and its primary function is to allow
the finding of the pieces that are missing from the operation. I don't
ever remember using musical notation to find out what note should come
next. Well, maybe in very low level theory where you are learning the
value of notes and to fill in the missing note for a workbook
assignment.

The point is that if one makes statements about how much swing there is
in different positions, one can make notation about it, and make
descriptions of what this might mean in performance.

No it doesn't! The words have no more exactness than the notes do. It
is also that "feel" is not an exact thing either. Even in Vienna, some
would be longer than another with the first beat and some would have
different ways of interpreting it. They would all be right, but there
are not exact words that mean anything EXCEPT in some instances to
those that already know the feel. And even then, it is only a hint as
to what the musician would do much more easily by listening and
playing with the musicians.


Well, MUSICIANS DO know the difference. Students and dabblers may not,
but musicians do know the difference.

Do you have a snippet put up somewhere where one can hear your playing?

I do not see the point here:

A couple musicians here claimed that linguists do not develop special
notation for describing dialects, which they do. Uninformed.
Maybe uninformed as to the pronunciation keys that will describe the
different pronunciations of dialects, but that is not the whole of
dialects. Even if there is a time and rhythm notation for dialects and
the same for pitch (as in Chinese) these are not going to give one the
true sound of the dialect. A professional Dialection (?) would maybe
be able to have a good guess at what it would sound like it from these
notations, but would be better served by simply hearing the dialect
and then and only then would it start to be truly understood and
repeated in an authentic manner.

Then the reasoning was that such a description of dialects is as useless
as trying to notate swing, the latter which in fact other musicians and
composers already do.

Maybe I don't understand this statement. If I do understand it you are
saying that all this talk about playing feel is useless as musicians
do it by ear anyway! But if that is true, you are in agreement with me
and that doesn't seem to be the case. Otherwise, I have no idea of
what you could possibly mean by that conclusion.

Perhaps you did not what statement you supported:

??? (missing some words?)


One faction said swing does not need any notation at all,

No they didn't. It was said that conventional notation was fine if the
players had a listening and playing foundation in the swing style.

being a style
known naturally only, requiring no description, and attempting doing any
form of description would be an anal attempt of achieving perfection. It
would be like dialects, none of which have any notation, but are just
communicated orally.

So in other words, the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin should
not be notated in any way, as that such attempts would just as anal as
attempting to do that with swing.

Hans Aberg

When you go out to buy apples, do you often come back with oranges? I
don't know if you do not understand the process of adjusting your
playing to create a feel or if you don't understand the difference
between Mandarin and Cantonese (Now really GuangZhou language)
But in China, the first thing is that like Taiwanese and some other
versions of Chinese, they use the ancient symbols and Mandarin uses
the modern characters. Other than that, the true language, i.e. the
WRITTEN language is the same for both. To compare this to music, you
would maybe have the time, rhythm and other written aspects of the
music the same but when you played an A CDE GA for example, you may
come out with something like EGCFAE. (the different note is there to
represent the additional tonal sounds that is present in Cantonese
that are not in Mandarin.) (by the way, in the written language, these
tones are NOT notated in either of the written languages and the only
way that you can learn them is by listening to them. No form of
description can describe exactly how they are produced and within each
spoken language, there are then many dialects or accents that
drastically alter the sound.) The language is written the same,however
except for the old and new characters, and means the same, but each
character (symbol) has an entirely different sound in the two
different languages. In order to describe and compare the verbal
sounds of the language you would use the romanization form called
pinyim and you would then have two entirely different sounding
languages.

As yet I can see no relationship with this analogy and any thing that
has been brought up in this group.
LJS

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