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

[adrian brown]

Okay so here’s the first tune from the A Garden of Dainty Delights in treble/treble clefs and treble/bass octave clefs. As you can see the treble/bass version gives fewer ledger lines and the whole piece fits more or less centred on the clefs, whereas the double treble version, the RH is more at the top of the clef and the LH at the bottom (as you’d expect).

 

Another thing I want to point out is that as Jim 2010 mentioned in the original thread, tablature can suggest note duration without being too strict about it. In staff notation, you are obliged to indicate a note length, which throws up other problems. In bars 1, 3, 4 etc. I am doing a sort of “rolling" om-pa where the om is held until the shorter pa comes in. In tablature this was easy to indicate approximately with a row of dashes after the digits, but here I am obliged to enter an extra voice with its accompanying rests - it just makes the whole thing seem more complicated on the page. Of course I could write it out in strict quarter-notes and anyone listening to the accompanying video would get the idea, but I wanted to indicate the more relaxed accompaniment a piece like this needs.

BTW this is far from being polyphonic music as suggested in the title of this thread, but since this book was the object of the original question, I thought I would use one of the tunes to illustrate my points. A typical 4-part renaissance piece is difficult enough to fit into a T&B clef system as the voices frequently cross each other and the middle voices weave between the clefs. Then you have to decide whether to keep the voices in the same clefs, using ledger lines, which makes it more difficult to read, but preserves the contours of each voice, or you let them cross, making it easier to read but difficult to see which line is which. No notation system is perfect, but it is a good idea to learn to read the most common clef combination, (treble/bass) as it gives you access to a lot more literature.

As I said in the other thread, I am willing to consider doing a staff notation version of A Garden of Dainty Delights if there seems to be enough interest to warrant the time it would take to re-edit it in this way.

Adrian

All in a Garden GreenTB.pdf All in a Garden GreenTT.pdf

[PortableOrgan]

57 minutes ago, adrian brown said:

As you can see the treble/bass version gives fewer ledger lines and the whole piece fits more or less centred on the clefs, whereas the double treble version, the RH is more at the top of the clef and the LH at the bottom (as you’d expect).

 

+1 for treble/bass. 

 

But then, the motto in my family's coat of arms is: "Fewa Ledga, Mo Betta"...

[Don Taylor]

3 hours ago, adrian brown said:

Okay so here’s the first tune from the A Garden of Dainty Delights ...

I took both versions and used the "Music Scanner" app on my Android phone, saved the results as Music XML files in Google Drive files and then opened them both in Musescore on my Windows PC*.

 

I transposed both of the scores down to God's key and changed the clefs to the ones that I prefer.  The results were pretty much the same for both of Adrian's files.  Music Scanner is not perfect, but it is pretty good.  Here is the final result, but I did not fix the few errors that Music Scanner introduced. (Added later  - actually, in the TT version of Adrian's PDFs there were no errors introduced that I could see, there were a few in the TB version.  The following PDF is 'good to go', I think.)

 

All in a Garden Green TT8 in G.pdf

 

Bottom line for me is that I can live with any of the options as I can fairly easily transform it to my preferences to give me a playable score that I can slow down, etc..

 

* I am pretty sure that you can do the same thing using Apple gear.

Edited August 22, 2022 by Don Taylor

[Don Taylor]

FWIW, here is a Youtube video of Musescore playing Adrian's arrangement using the concertina sound font - see bottom of my posts.

 

I clicked too soon and missed the first note when I captured the screen, but you can get that note the second time around - sorry about that.

 

Added later:  Music Scanner picked the tempo.  I have just listened to Adrian's recording and he plays it a lot faster.  You can get Youtube to speed up videos so try running it at .1.5x, or faster, speed.

Edited August 22, 2022 by Don Taylor

[Łukasz Martynowicz]

A tip about voices in Musescore - you only have to keep strict pause notation for the first voice. You can delete any unwanted auto-generated pauses in other voices freely. So when arranging for a single instrument it is often better to assign voices of the tune to musescore voice slots in measure by measures fashion rather than globally sticking to how the piece is written. 

[Don Taylor]

1 hour ago, Łukasz Martynowicz said:

you only have to keep strict pause notation for the first voice. You can delete any unwanted auto-generated pauses in other voices freely...

Interesting.  There is only one pause in the second voice in that piece and, yes, I can delete it.  Nor was that pause in Adrian's original score.  I will bear that in mind for the future.  Thx.

[Aaron Bittel]

Sorry to have started the topic and then abandoned it -- it's been a busy few days!

 

Adrian, thanks for writing out those examples. Personally, I find the treble-treble version easier to read, but I take your point about ledger lines. The treble-bass version, with both staves an octave down, throws me for a loop at first (especially the right hand) but I'm sure I could get used to it pretty quickly.

 

From the examples and for all the reasons you mentioned, I can see why tablature would make sense for notating a part that's more of a realization, even if I personally still find the staff notation (either version) easier to process. But as you say, I was really thinking of music with two or three independent voices in counterpoint. (And yeah, four would be a real challenge, both to write and to read!)

 

Meanwhile, the discussion of notating improvised/extemporized left hand parts is interesting, and is probably much more familiar territory for most concertina players, especially anglo players -- myself included! But that's really a different case than, say, Bach two-part inventions arranged for concertina. Has anyone here tried something like that?

 

- Aaron

 

 

[hjcjones]

On 8/20/2022 at 5:02 AM, Aaron Bittel said:

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.

 

Whereas I would suppose that anyone able to read and play from staff notation would be able to go directly to the original scores and would not need a book aimed specifically at concertina players.  I would also suppose that these are only a fairly small proportion of the total number of anglo players.

 

I am not a serious student of Renaissance polyphony, but having heard what Adrian Brown and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne can achieve I was curious, so I bought A Garden of Dainty Delights.  I am an experienced and, I like to think, a fairly competent player, but I play by ear. I can just about make sense of a single-line melody in treble clef, although I can't sight read.  All the other options you suggest, and especially those with bass clef or lots of ledger lines, leave me totally baffled.  I would not for a moment consider buying a book like that. I bought Adrian's book because it is aimed at players like me.

 

 

 

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

I often feel that the approach of knowing the basic melodic "Skelton" of a musical piece; a sort of frame work as it were, is enough, and then you can let the left hand find the way round intuitively .. interweaving inbetween where required, and by ear. So producing a more fluid feel to musical performance. 

[Anglo-Irishman]

20 hours ago, SIMON GABRIELOW said:

a sort of frame work as it were, is enough, and then you can let the left hand find the way round intuitively

This is how I approch familiar melodies for which I have no score. However, the result is not baroque. Perhaps, if I were 400 years old, it might be.😄

I learnt most of what I know about harmony and counterpoint from singing in choirs. As a bass, I'm what you might call "part of the choirmaster's left hand." And after many years of singing bass, I can sight-read the bass part in most classical and baroque choral pieces, because I can sense what is coming up next, and merely have to refer to the dots to see if it's the higher or lower of the possible alternatives.

 

However, with composers of justified repute, like Bach or Handel, the next note in the score is sometimes not one of the notes I would have expected. My reaction is usually, "Wow! I wouldn't have thought of that, but it's a stroke of genius!"

I suppose the attraction of composed music, be it Baroque or Classical or Romantic, has to do with these little gems, which even a competent concertinist, left alone with his instrument, would never uncover. And to realise them as the composer intended, we obviously need to access the score in its entirety.

 

Having said all that, I do believe that the Anclo is an instrument for "performers' music" - which in no way diminishes my respect for those who use it for "composers' music." If I wanted to play hymns in four-part harmony from the song-book - like the Salvation Army - I'd learn to sight-read for my (ex-S.A.) Crane/Triumph duet!

Cheers,

John