source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 19:31:49 -0700 Subject: notation From: Paul Rapoport Thanks to Johnny Reinhard for his reply on using cents notation. It is true that in using other signs as accidentals in front of notes you may get notes with conflicting directions, e.g. an up arrow but a down comma of some other sort, or two of one and three of another. But I don't see this as a conflict. Nor would I see it as precipitating working out cents values. In JI music that is truly harmonic, each pitch may come from another, so that the signs in front of the notes show this relationship, and therefore how to tune the note, including whom and what to listen to most closely in the ensemble. Certainly Ben Johnston's notation works this way, despite whatever problems it may have. It suggests to performers that they are in a sense performing relationships. Cents notations to me suggest performing fixed values out of context. If Johnny finds that performers have to calculate cents, then I wonder whether performers faced with a cents-notated score for JI have to determine relationships, since no one performs numbers (i.e. cents values) in an absolute sense. In the only piece of JI I have had performed, the (amateur) performers were indeed initially confused by the signs, wanting to know just how flat or sharp certain notes were. But what does "a little sharp" or "quite flat" mean when all you want is certain notes to be in tune? I taught them to hear the harmonic structures, I suppose with some success, and kept the cents values for the preface to the score, for those interested. This turned out to be fairly close to 0% of the performing group, even including a math teacher. But I emphasize I have not had a lot of experience with performers in JI; where I live there is little opportunity for this kind of thing. Paul Rapoport Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 28 Oct 1996 22:17 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA07142; Mon, 28 Oct 1996 05:56:19 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA04747 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id UAA14960; Sun, 27 Oct 1996 20:56:17 -0800 Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 20:56:17 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu