music notation: a personal language?

[crazy for ivan moravec]

do you think it's personal for every composer? you know, all those signs: pp, p, ff, f, mf, phrases, slurs, beamings, double bar lines, rests, etc...

do these things help tell us a composer's "ideal" concept for his piece?

for example, notice the beaming of brahms...  he is fond of connecting beams of eighth notes belonging to different measures. i guess this is because of phrasing... but i rarely see this with chopin. and i'm pretty sure we'd find more differences of their notation in their manuscripts, how nice!

what do you think?

[allchopin]

That's a neat question probably more deserving of thought than the brief time I have given it.  Personally, I find music notation very impersonal, much like typing messages on a computer with this limited ASCII character set.  Notation limits a composer so much that 10 performers are able to 'interpret' a piece 10 different ways and come out with legitamate results that follow the score, more or less.  Adding dynamics and phrase markings are only the beginnings of describing what the music is saying, and the rest is up to the performer, which is good and bad.  For the sake of comparison, I would say our spoken language is 10 times more accurate and effective than standard music notation.

[bench warmer]

Take a look at Percy Grainger's  In Dahomey  also titled Cakewalk Smasher. (Great fun to play)

 He refused to give dirctions in Italian or Latin. So you see directions from him to play: clumsy & wildly,  hammeringly, like a brass band-explosive. There's one directive where he wnts you to "wrench" a chord.  There are a few parabolas (yes parabolas) where he wants you to gliss-up & gliss down And directives to " slide with the fist on black keys"

The editor did add cross-beams to "clarify rhythm" where Grainger had only a string of single semi-q's.  Editor also re-marked pedalling.

I think in most cases, what's on the manuscript is the composer trying to show you what's in his head.

Agree that written notations are imperfect but thats all we got.

[crazy for ivan moravec]

That's a neat question probably more deserving of thought than the brief time I have given it.  Personally, I find music notation very impersonal, much like typing messages on a computer with this limited ASCII character set.  Notation limits a composer so much that 10 performers are able to 'interpret' a piece 10 different ways and come out with legitamate results that follow the score, more or less.  Adding dynamics and phrase markings are only the beginnings of describing what the music is saying, and the rest is up to the performer, which is good and bad.  For the sake of comparison, I would say our spoken language is 10 times more accurate and effective than standard music notation.

yes, i think it did and does limit composers. but i think composers know this fact as well, and so they would have even strived some more to express it well in this limited language, even to a point of unconsciously making it personal already... you know, alterations, language usage, etc. chopin is the composer who used the word DOLCE more frequently than any other composer, and it somehow developed a special meaning for his pieces which might be different from other composers' usage of it.. or his accents mean differently from those by Liszt...
what's your opinion on this?

[emmdoubleew]

Beethoven was always openly dissapointed with publishers because they ignored the curves of his beams and the lengths of his measures.

[soliloquy]

I like Rzewski's.  Very original and helpful.

[prometheus]

In the east calligraphy is an art form. The alphabeth doesn't loan itself very well for it. But music notation does.

Sadly, there aren't many composers that were skilled at calligraphy writing their scores. I haven't seen a lot but I do know Scriabin is quite pretty to look at.

[allchopin]

yes, i think it did and does limit composers. but i think composers know this fact as well, and so they would have even strived some more to express it well in this limited language, even to a point of unconsciously making it personal already... you know, alterations, language usage, etc. chopin is the composer who used the word DOLCE more frequently than any other composer, and it somehow developed a special meaning for his pieces which might be different from other composers' usage of it.. or his accents mean differently from those by Liszt...
what's your opinion on this?

This is all just a matter of interpretation.  Inherently, there is nothing different between the dolce Chopin writes on his score, and the dolce Liszt writes, but we as performers may take them to mean different things - which is why the notation fails to provide us with enough information.  Think about when somebody makes a sarcastic comment - we take their tone and their body language to make the sentence mean the complete opposite of what they actually said in words.  That is how inaccurate spoken language can be without physical or linguistic/tonal aides. 
Worse yet, think about music notation in Bach's day.  He was writing music that sounded wonderful in his head, but when put on paper, only covered the bare essentials: pitches, accidentals, note values, key signature, maybe a definite time signature (and if the editor didn't screw around too much, slur marks).  For keyboard works, dynamics and phrasing were left pretty much up to the performer to figure out (from our knowledge of music theory, on how the music SHOULD sound).  It was really only until about the twentieth century did composers ache for the need to be more specific, such as Schoenberg, Messiaen, Crumb, etc.  Even with the beginning of the focus on tone colors during Impressionism, I'd say this desire began (Ravel was explicit in words, and wanted performers to just follow how the music was written).
But in the end, what is limiting us most, I think, is the very instrument we are playing.  We can't expect the piano to do much more in the future than we habe already done today, no matter what notation we use.  When electronic music becomes more popular to perform, I believe we will start to see the notation evolve in hyperspeed.