Oh good grief.
I've just found that I've misaligned a load of stuff that involves reinputting some serious tuplets...

Well here's the thing.
The group is split into two, one of which is playing at crotchet=72, the other playing at crotchet=87.5.
Instruments from group one change to group two and vice versa. This means that I'm having to basically do the equivalent of getting Sibelius very drunk indeed. I wish I could do the same but I'm fasting before blood tests etc. tomorrow. I hate water.

Currently creating ..... a giant mess!!  Boxes everywhere, CDs in stacks in every room, and life in a general state of disarray.   

Packing for an transatlantic move is a very particular brand of bizarre.




hh -- I too would be quite curious to see what you're up to w/ this current Sibelius project.  And, btw, I quite enjoyed your blog post about dynamics ...

he didn't say you weren't, of course! 

I think far too little attention is paid to dynamics. Many composers, even those who are otherwise highly systematic in their work, seem to throw them on as a cosmetic afterthought. It often turns out that most of my comments to performers during rehearsals are to do with dynamics, because often this is the last thing performers think about, as if for them too it's just the "icing on the cake".

There's also my favourite Carter story - apparently a player said to him at a rehearsal, 'Mr Carter, if you ignore the dynamics your music doesn't make any sense at all,' to which Carter replied, 'I thought you were meant to play the dynamics.'



Apologies if one of you guys told me this story. I can't remember where I got it from.

It's in Rosen's essay on contemporary music, in Critical Entertainments.

Here's an example of non-obvious dynamics, from the beginning of Brahms's Sonata in F minor Op. 5. Look at where the fortissimo peak of the crescendo comes - not on the climactic 6/4 harmony, or the arrival on the dominant in the following bar, either of which a 'vertical' approach might suggest (and how invariably I have heard it played), but rather in the previous bar, at the horizontal peak of the upper line, though also before the descending chromatic bass line has reached its lower point. Also note the lack of accents on the downbeats in the first three bars, but their presence on the other beats, absolutely contrary to a Schenkerian vertical approach would suggest (and, again, contrary to how I have mostly heard it played).

This is all very interesting and an issue that is of vital importance. I do agree that the composer ought to make reasonable efforts to get the dymamic markings right in his/her scores, otherwise there will inevitably be room for misinterpretation.

Richard - you say that you often have to discuss such matters at rehearsal - so what happens if you can't be present at such rehearsals?

Whilst I can accept the idea that a composer can get overly obsessive and fussy about inclusion of performance directions in general (viz. the two very different examples of Grainger's Country Gardens and Schönberg's Suite, Op. 25 for piano), to err on the other side seems to me to be potentially, if not actually, very risky; if a composer is prepared knowingly to take such a risk with his/her dynamics, then so be it, I suppose and performances of his/her work will have to stand or fall in accordance with the likely wide variety of results.

It is not, I think, a frequent occurrence that I take Ian's view here and disagree with Sorabji's (!), but Sorabji was often far too lax in his dynamic markings, I think - OK, maybe performers have managed for the most part to do what he'd hoped, regardless of the shortage of performances directions, but that's probably more a case of excellent good fortune than reasonable expectation. The idea that "if all the dynamics and articulation markings had been left out of a Sorabji score, then a good musician would be able to fill them in from the context, and they would be the same as Sorabji's" may, on the face of it, be little better than some 90% fantasy and 10% likelihood.

The other problem - that of sticking dynamic markings or other performance directions on as some kind of afterthought seems to me to be somewhat akin to shoving spices into a dish for the sake of it rather than giving due thought to what spice combinations might work most effectively in the dish concerned and is accordingly to be discouraged at every opportunity; one may as well treat the notes in the same cavalier fashion, yet who would consider doing that? All these things are surely integral to the composition in every case.

So - the rule of thumb should presumably be to be clear and conscientious without being autocratically and inflexibly proscriptive.

Best,

Alistair

This raises what to me are interesting questions about the order of priorities with which one actually learns a piece of music. Many start by 'learning the notes' (meaning learning the pitches) at a slow tempo, then work on rhythm, dynamics, tempo, etc. But there's quite a bit of music for which this may not necessarily be either the optimum approach or that which will best enable the most important priorities in the work to be projected well in performance. In music with continuous tempo shifts, say, an approach whereby the work is learned at a continuous, slow tempo, can tend to iron out such modifications in the final result, and when dynamics are worked on later on (when they are particularly detailed), sometimes they can lose some immediacy in the process. Not saying this has to be the case, but in my experience it certainly can be. But much opinion would not think that playing with erroneous dynamics is anything like as bad a sin as playing with some wrong pitches.