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قراءة كتاب How to Write Music: Musical Orthography

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How to Write Music: Musical Orthography

How to Write Music: Musical Orthography

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 5

the measure should be divided into as many equal portions as there are beats in it. One well-known composer, it is said, rules beat-lines in light pencil, as well as bar-lines, in his full scores. In very elaborate music this symmetrical arrangement cannot be fully carried out; sixty-four sixty-fourth notes cannot be written in the same space as one whole note; and a whole note would look lost in the space required for the sixty-fourth notes. But simple music can be made quite symmetrical, and in all music such beat-lines, actual or mental, are an invaluable check and guide.

Each note should be placed in the left-hand end of its space. This is for the simple reason that music, like words, is read from left to right and, roughly, space represents duration. Any other arrangement is misleading, as may be seen from old music, in which a note was often placed in the middle of its space. The following (Fig. 9) is an example from an organ work of Rinck's (1770–1846).


Fig. 9.

But for the fact that in open score half notes below the middle line have their stems turned down, even an expert would not improbably suppose the time to be four half notes in the bar. This is not the case, the time is two half notes and the whole note is to be sounded simultaneously with the two half notes.

“Confusion worse confounded,” is, so far as the eye is concerned, hardly too strong a term to apply to the results of this illogical method when applied to polyphonic music. Compare a and b, Fig. 10, in the former of which four notes intended to be begun simultaneously are no two of them in line, owing to each being in the middle of its space!


Fig. 10.

This practice was consistently carried out, even when it involved writing a note on the bar-line! or a note in one measure and its dot in the next (see Fig. 11).


Fig. 11.

(Pianists will recall a modern instance, so far as the dot is concerned, in a little exercise in C major of Czerny's.)

The practice cannot have been due to the non-invention of the “tie” or “bind.” For though the first use of this is difficult to trace, clear instances, in the form of a bracket, ︷, occur in Morley's Practical Music, published in 1597.


Rests.

15.—Rests, especially whole note rests, when used for a whole measure, are still very often illogically placed in the middle of the space they represent. This has been defended on the ground that they represent silence or inaction, and that therefore no error can arise from their appearance being deferred. But a performer should be conscious of the action or inaction of every voice or part. If there be a seeming vacuum or hiatus, how is he to know whether it is a note or rest which has been omitted? If he concludes, from the absence of any note, that a rest is intended, he can only guess how long it will prove to be when it does come. Therefore, in the writer's opinion, rests should be located on the same principle as notes. If it be not a profanation to say so, since the example is from Bach, the rest in Fig. 12 would have been better placed at the beginning of the measure. Let a sheet of paper be held over the right half of the measure, and though the player will be able to begin, he will not know in how many parts the piece is written.


Fig. 12.


16.—In open score, that is, in writing a single melody or part on one stave, it is usual to make whole note rests below the fourth line, and half note rests above the third. Quarter note rests should be written exactly in the middle of the stave. The crook of eighth note rests, and the upper crook of shorter rests, is generally placed in the third space, in the absence of any reason to the contrary. The stems of rests are, in manuscript music especially, better slanted somewhat. This helps to distinguish them from the stems of notes—in rapidly written manuscript a not unimportant thing!


17.—There are two forms of quarter note rest, the English, which is like the eighth note rest but turned to the right-hand, and the German, which is somewhat difficult to describe. The German is far the better of the two as being much more distinct from the eighth note rest. It is, however, harder to write, and of the slightly varying forms, perhaps the easiest is that with a crook at each end of a very oblique stem and which is thus very much like a reversed letter Z (see the first example in Fig. 13).


Manuscript forms of German quarter note rest.
Fig. 13.


18.—In short score, that is, in writing two or more parts or voices on one stave, the rests are placed, not only in the top or bottom space of the stave as may best indicate to which part they apply, but above and below it, involving, in the case of whole note and half note rests, the use of a leger-line (see b, Fig. 14). This is partly because the stems of all rests are turned down, and therefore cannot be made, as the stems of notes can, to indicate the part they belong to by the direction taken. This, therefore, has to be shown by their position on, or off, the stave (see Fig. 14).


Fig. 14.

It will be seen that the lower eighth note rest in the first example belongs to the same part as the following sixteenth note rest, though by no means on a line with it.

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