Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-08-31 14:41
OK, so some of the ground has been cleared. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
I'd like to change the terminology, if that's OK, mainly because the words 'prescriptive' and 'descriptive' are a bit unwieldy. Also, they've been used the other way around by a couple of people.
The change -- and this is standard in the literature, by the way -- is to use the terms:
THIN notation as the equivalent of 'descriptive notation', and
THICK notation as the equivalent of 'prescriptive notation'.
So, Mozart's notation is 'thin' because a substantial part of a contemporary performance would not have been explicitly represented in the score.
Webern's notation is 'thick', on the other hand, because his instructions are more detailed -- indeed, copious.
What I wrote in response to Clariknight lacked clarity -- I'm sorry about that -- but it did perhaps serve to get over the notion that someone reading those two definitions (and their previous equivalents, which talked only about 'descriptive' and 'prescriptive') may well be making assumptions of which they are unaware -- and moreover, that those assumptions may be different from the assumptions of another reader.
Lelia's post might be a good beginning in seeing this. She imagines a responsible editor 'thickening' Mozart's 'thin' score by adding "dynamic markings and other additions or alterations in a non-distracting, quiet but legible color."
I'd say that, to a modern performer, such editing acts in the direction of killing off our ability to respond in the appropriate way to Mozart's thin notation. It puts a bit of modern grit into a system that already works quite well, thank you.
How can I presume to say that? Well, Mozart the professional didn't need any editorial changes to his system; and he didn't require it of his publishers; perhaps we can extend him the courtesy of appreciating the likelihood of his knowing a bit more about what made his music work than we do, at first blush.
I haven't got around to saying much about what the system IS, yet, though I imagine quite a few of you know. But here's a taster.
Sometimes my orchestra has a director who says something like, "make sure that THAT chord comes away, so that the vocal entry isn't obscured." Many players reach for their pencils at that point, to write in a diminuendo.
But in this style, ANY chord implies a lightening towards its end -- more or less. So for the less stylistically aware, writing in a diminuendo is simply a crude modern approximation of what they should have been doing -- 'more or less' -- in the first place. And what THAT does is to reinforce the notion that an unpencilled chord isn't subject to the conventions of the style.
But it is.
So, thin notation comes as a package. When you understand it, you see why modern editorial markings obscure it.
Actually, this 'more or less' lightening of the texture that is such an important feature of Mozart's music isn't really capturable by calling it a diminuendo, as anyone who has engaged in the job of teaching it to a student will confirm. It involves timbre as well. It's what good playing -- and more suggestively, good singing -- consisted of at the time.
And -- here's the important bit -- it's not as though the 'style' is a BACKGROUND to what expression we then want to put on top of it. The very variability of the elements of the style -- the 'more or less' of each one of them -- CONSTITUTES the expression. The musical notation has the expressive possibilities contained 'within' its thinness.
I'll go on to talk about what I've come to call the 'bounce setting' of a passage in the next post. The idea that there is something like a 'bounce knob', that we can turn up and down in our playing, is useful in all sorts of other music, as well as in the classical.
Tony
Post Edited (2009-08-31 17:37)
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