There’s a lot of approximated information in notation.
Three examples from this week.
- In a piano/vocal score of “Any Dream Will Do” swung rhythms of dotted quarter, eighth were notated as quarter-tie-dotted eighth, sixteenth. As I was writing out a bass line, I had to make sure that we all agreed on what it was going to sound like so that the rhythms would match up. Luckily, the pianist agreed that the notation was overly fussy and inaccurate to the feel.
- In some background parts we sight read tonight, the syllable was “dut.” But the vowel required was in the grey areas. Somewhere between “cut” and “put” and “coat”. But there’s no universal pronunciation guide for syllables, so we do our best and then teach the approximation.
- A favorite pet peeve! How many piano vocal sheets do you know that are simply marked Moderately. Moderately can mean anywhere between, I don’t know, 96 & 140bpm or so. It’s an approximation of tempo that requires us to know the music before we are able to play it.
Many musicians, and especially young musicians, want to consult the score for everything. We simply need to replicate what’s already on the page, they assume. The truth is that there’s a lot that isn’t on the page, and we have to work hard to “read between the ties” to get to the music.