Music in Trains

I ran across this interesting quote that is very illuminating:

.”In playing for contemporary composers, I’ve always felt that the ones I respected were not inflexible about what you did to their music. They permitted a certain degree of freedom. I’ve found that the lesser composers were the ones who insisted, no, I said mezzo piano and that’s not my conception of mezzo piano. I think the great composers believe their work will endure even if one does not adhere to the exact indications of the music.”
Isidore Cohen (quoted in Nicholas Delbanco, The Beaux Arts Trio: A Portrait)

Engraving is a production step that went from the individual to the pros and is now creeping back to the responsibility of the composer.

Early-music composers had quite possibly the most difficult job: engrave each piece AND develop a system with which to notate. It wasn’t until around at least 800 that music began to be notated in any systematic way and it was a long time (about another 800 years) before the modern system became fairly well developed.

Around 1500, shortly after Gutenberg developed a movable type printing system, music engraving became the job of professionals. Notation was more or less becoming standardized and composers were more easily able to produce multiple copies of a piece of music by handing it over to an engraver.

About three years ago, when my then-future-wife was just moving to Akron in preparation for graduate studies, her grandmother said that some distant relatives happened to live in northeast Ohio. Over the course of the next two years, she—and subsequently we—became great friends with these ‘cousins’ (actually a much more complicated relationship, but this is how we refer to it for simplicity).

Last night we had the pleasure of visiting with them and taking in a concert at the Copley Bandstand. It was a fun night of big band music, courtesy of Swing Machine. Great memories of playing second tenor in a big band came rushing back to my mind as I listened to charts such as Basie’s “April in Paris.”

I submit this sentence, from Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, as Exhibit A:

“Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots … you stop.”

… and this passage, Col 1:9-14, as Exhibit B:

“For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”