Playing Polyphonic Music: What Kind(s) of Notation Do You Use?

[Aaron Bittel]

In another discussion, I expressed pretty strong surprise that Adrian Brown's book of Renaissance polyphonic arrangements for anglo, A Garden of Dainty Delights, puts only the melody line in staff notation, while all of the accompaniment is written (along with the melody) in Coover-system tablature. I was surprised mostly because I suppose that the cohort of concertina players who would be interested in, and capable of, tackling Renaissance polyphony on concertina would overlap pretty heavily with those who know how to read staff notation and know where the notes are on their instruments; whereas folks who only read tablature for anglo would be relatively less likely to attempt this kind of music in the first place. So even though my own use case would be playing on a 40-button anglo, staff notation would be equally accessible on 30-, 34-, 39-, and 50-button anglos, as well as, hypothetically, any duet system.*

 

Well, I realize that unfortunately I don't (yet) have the data to back this assertion up, however intuitive it might be to me.

 

To atone for my sins, I am putting the question out to you all: if you play any kind of polyphonic music any kind of concertina, what kind of notation system, if any, makes the most sense for you? This isn't specific to Renaissance music, or broader "classical" music -- it could include anything with more than one musical part happening simultaneously, where those parts would normally be written out somehow.

 

- Aaron

 

* I would assume grand staff notation, with a staff for each hand or each voice, totally falls down for English system players. But maybe I'm wrong about that?

Edited August 20, 2022 by Aaron Bittel
corrected a couple poll options and fixed some wording

[conband]

Puzzled.  No,  2 line 3.  If you have one treble and one bass clef, where do all the ledger lines come from?

 

Les

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

I use treble clef, as standard, for my 30 key Anglo system, and refer to the parts [if I need to] of any printed music book which has the instruments marked in it.  but mostly I improvise accompanying chords or other notes as I go along; I feel that often too much other instrument technique is applied to concertina, which may not always suit or be the best approach to playing them.

 

[Steve Schulteis]

I play G/D, so this is more theoretical, but for C/G Anglo, I like the idea of treble and bass clef, both an octave low. That puts the range for each hand pretty neatly on its own staff with minimal ledger lines. On G/D, I often use a treble and octave treble staff.

 

I can learn from anything you listed, but I can't sight read very well. Slow melodies in familiar keys are fine, but much more than that will require some practice for me to play nicely.

[Aaron Bittel]

2 hours ago, conband said:

If you have one treble and one bass clef, where do all the ledger lines come from?

Good question. I should have included examples!

 

All of the following show the same pitches. The upper staff/voice is for the right hand, and the lower staff/voice is for the left.

 

1. Single staff, different voices indicated by stem direction

 

2. Two treble staves, notes at sounding pitch

 

3. One treble and one bass staff, notes at sounding pitch (bass goes into the ledger lines)

 

4. One treble staff at pitch, one bass staff notated an octave below pitch (not so many ledger lines)

[Łukasz Martynowicz]

I voted „tabulature” as it didn’t allow me to use „none” selection. But I have to elaborate, as there is no option for what I use: a chromatic notation system called Parncutt tetragram. It is a single stave of a different line layout, extendable up and down continously, with „piano roll” like absolute pitch positions (natural, sharp and flat pitch have their own positions, not sharp/flat signs). Additionally, I use colour coded LH and RH and additional colour variations for sharps/flats to easily read key from without traditional key notation. This system is pretty much ideal for Hayden, as it follows the same logic of black/white keys division via specific line pattern. So while it is a proper musical notation, it also isn’t any staff related answer provided. 

[Don Taylor]

I would prefer the bottom clef on #2 to be an octave clef:

or an 8vb below the first note.

[Aaron Bittel]

6 minutes ago, Łukasz Martynowicz said:

I voted „tabulature” as it didn’t allow me to use „none” selection.

You're right, I should have included "none" and "other" options. Actually, I had "none" in there originally, and then when I filled out the poll for myself I saw that it included its own "all" and "none" options, so I took out mine since I thought it was redundant, and of course now it's no longer editable. Oops.

 

2 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

I would prefer the bottom clef on #2 to be an octave clef

If I'm understanding right, that was Steve's suggestion too. Here's what that would look like for comparison:

Definitely much friendlier to read!

[Steve Schulteis]

1 hour ago, Aaron Bittel said:

If I'm understanding right, that was Steve's suggestion too. Here's what that would look like for comparison:

Definitely much friendlier to read!

 

Pretty much. Since I'm reading for G/D, I keep the top staff in actual pitch and adjust the bottom staff, but that's just details.

 

I also make use of Gary Coover tabs, since the best fingering pattern for a note may not be obvious until you get to a later note and realize you need to make an awkward leap or bellows change. When I tab out a song with two staves, I arrange the tabs around the top staff, right hand above and left below (i.e. between the staves) without regard for which staff the notes are on. In the standard notation, top staff gets the melody, and bottom staff gets all harmony voices.

[Don Taylor]

1 hour ago, Aaron Bittel said:

If I'm understanding right, that was Steve's suggestion too. Here's what that would look like for comparison:

No, I meant the octave lower clef like this:

 

Which is what I think Steve meant.

 

One way you could satisfy most folks would be to include both staves and Coover tab notation.  I think that Gary considered this in the early days but I suspect that he considered the bass clef and not the treble eight lower clef.  Gary?

 

Gary does provide the melody in standard notation but not the accompaniment.   I also think having standard notation for the LHS in addition to the RHS would also make it easier for tab users to figure out the duration of notes.

 

However, I do think that you have opened a large can of worms... 

[Aaron Bittel]

I think that's a quirk of MuseScore -- it seems to use the transposed clefs in the opposite way, so I just went with that. (When I tried to switch to the treble 8vb clef it showed the pitches above the staff!) But yeah, the way you show it is the way I would normally expect it to be written.

 

39 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

However, I do think that you have opened a large can of worms... 

No kidding! 🪱 🪱 🪱 🪱🥫

[Anglo-Irishman]

I've ticked "Anglo" and "Crane duet" under point 1, but my most-used notation would have been "None of the above."

I'm very much an "extemporiser" or "improvisationalist," or whatever you'd call it. I get a tune in my head and an instrument in my hands, and the music flows from head to hands, the melody getting harmonised on the way. This applies to both concertina systems, the 5-string banjo and the Autoharp - on the mandolin I just play melody or single-line harmony, and on guitar and ukulele I just play chords.

 

It seems that I have a pretty good memory for melodies and a pretty good feeling for chord changes, so I can play (and sing) for hours on end without having to read anything. The first thing I have to look up is the lyrics of a song. (Each verse of a song has different words, whereas the melody and chords are the same for each verse!)

 

What I would look up next would be the melody, if I haven't heard it often enough or recently enough to have it in my head. For this, a single stave with a treble clef, such as you'll find in folk-song collections, is adequate.

 

What I may or may not need to look up is the chord sequence, if there's something subtle that I can't quite get my brain around. Here, the best notation is the chord symbols (C, G7, Am, etc.) that are also to be found in the more modern folk-song collections.

 

So that's my notation: a treble stave with chord symbols over it and lyrics under it. This is what I would need to work up a concertina (or banjo, or Autoharp) arrangement of a song I haven't heard before.

 

BTW as a choir singer (bass) I sight-read standard notation!

But then, I'm a trained singer, but a self-taught instrumentalist, and sight-reading is usually a part of training, not of self-study.

Cheers,

John

 

[Aaron Bittel]

1 hour ago, Don Taylor said:

No, I meant the octave lower clef like this

OK, you're right, I did misunderstand. The 8vb treble clef displays pitches an octave higher than they sound (the tenor in your example sings at the same pitch as the alto). That makes more sense for what Steve is doing, using it on the lower staff for G/D anglo, because otherwise the notes would display on several ledger lines below the staff.

 

And now that I re-read your original post, Don, I see that's what you were suggesting too. And that definitely makes sense if the left hand is playing more in the bottom octave, at the expense of putting the highest notes on the left hand (on a C/G anglo anyway) way above the staff. A G/D wouldn't have that problem, I guess.

 

It's all trade-offs!

[gcoover]

17 hours ago, Don Taylor said:

One way you could satisfy most folks would be to include both staves and Coover tab notation.  I think that Gary considered this in the early days but I suspect that he considered the bass clef and not the treble eight lower clef.  Gary?

 

Early on I struggled with all the different staff variations and ultimately decided on simplicity for a variety of reasons.

 

I wanted the notation in real pitch, so that made showing accompaniment problematical and potentially very cluttered. And as a side effect it made the music too bulky to easily fit on the page.

 

I didn't want the melody to get lost amongst all the other notes, especially for those not used to reading music, and I didn't want to scare off any beginners with a daunting or frightening pile of notes.

 

That's why I also include a Button Map with every arrangement showing which buttons are needed, so no need to panic or worry about all 30 buttons at once. If someone sees that a tune only requires a handful of buttons then they are more likely to attempt learning it.

 

Most of the professional Anglo players I know don't write down their left hand arrangements, they just play and think more in patterns, which often vary from verse to verse anyway. 

 

I like the fact that the tab can be easily applied with a pencil to printed melodies in tunebooks with no need to draw in additional staves or write in a bunch of dots.

 

I see the tab as a suggestion and a crutch that should never be treated as gospel! I want players to use it initially as a guide but to feel free to experiment, be adventurous, leave out notes, add notes, make mistakes, and discover their own accompaniment. 

 

And, true confession time - although I'm a keyboard player from way back I've pretty much forgotten how to read bass clef! I guess it's from too many years playing EC and not needing to know that other clef. So, I'd rather think in terms of buttons instead of having to also add the additional step of relearning bass clef. As for trying to learn someone else's previously printed multi-staff polyphonic scores, that's just way too much work!

 

Gary

 

 

Edited August 21, 2022 by gcoover

[Don Taylor]

42 minutes ago, gcoover said:

Most of the professional Anglo players I know don't write down their left hand arrangements, they just play and think more in patterns, which often vary from verse to verse anyway

I think that this is the more interesting idea.  Maybe we need to try to catalog these patterns and give examples of how they can be used and sometimes can be used interchangeably. 

 

There are lots of books and videos that talk about left-hand patterns for piano players, strumming and picking patterns for guitar players and so on.  I remember a series of videos showing maybe 50 different left-hand piano patterns played against 'Michael, row the boat ashore'.

 

Mike Fuele posted something along these lines some time ago:

 

[Luke Hillman]

3 hours ago, gcoover said:

Most of the professional Anglo players I know don't write down their left hand arrangements, they just play and think more in patterns, which often vary from verse to verse anyway.

 

This is how I do it. Eventually I'll get around to forcing myself to practice sight reading, but for the moment I'm almost entirely playing by ear, which I can sometimes speed up by looking at a single melody staff with chord symbols or using anglo piano for more complicated patterns (shameless self-plug ). In the early days, I would have been lost without Gary's tablature, and I find I still look at it when I'm trying to imitate the style of other players. Obviously, Renaissance-style polyphonic music is more complicated than my standard repertoire of morris tunes, but it can be done with practice and lots of patience.

[David Barnert]

11 hours ago, Don Taylor said:

I would prefer the bottom clef on #2 to be an octave clef

 

I was thinking the same thing. On a Hayden (other duets?), the buttons of the left hand are in the same pattern as the right hand but an octave lower. So each hand would play a given written note in its staff the same way.

[Anglo-Irishman]

Yes, knowing the chords is very important for extemporising arrangements. I have a chord chart, printed on A5 and laminated, in the bottom of my concertina case. It's for a C/G Anglo, and you'll find it here.

Cheers,

John