Talk:Notes inégales

Composition, notation and performance

The 'History' section currently opens with "The practice of applying unequal treatment to successive notes with the same notated value... ". But isn't that the wrong way around? It suggests that the notation dictates the performance. Bur surely, before all that, comes the composition which ultimately aims at a performance, not notation; the composer uses notation merely as a convenient carrier towards performance (a little like the wrapping around a candy bar). Wouldn't "The practice of notating unequal note lengths with equal value..." be better? (Neither is perfect, but both fall short in the same manner, namely, failing to mention notes being in pairs. So so let's not get distracted by that imperfection quite yet.) Feline Hymnic (talk) 14:15, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

You can switch it around if you like -- it makes sense that way. (I wrote this more than six years ago and no longer remember my thought process; I probably had several books open in front of me.) The writeup in the current New Grove by David Fuller does imply that the performers were enlivening what was already notated. (I probably used the 1980 Grove article by the same writer, which I don't have in front of me at the moment.) Likely it went both ways. The current summary at the top of their article dodges the issue of which comes first: "A rhythmic convention according to which certain divisions of the beat move in alternately long and short values, even if they are written equal." Antandrus (talk) 14:26, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

OK. I've re-written it along those lines, but also mentioning en passant the concept of it typically applying to pairs of notes. Feline Hymnic (talk) 16:15, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Additional citations

Why and where does this article need additional citations for verification? What references does it need and how should they be added? Hyacinth (talk) 23:12, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I didn't add that template and it looks well referenced to me. Expect he probably meant just that it would be good to use the ref templates to link the references at the bottom of the page to relevant sections of the article. It is easy to do. Just wrap your references with <ref>... </ref> and put them into the body of the text wherever you want the footnote to go. If you refer to the same one several times you do it as <ref name=blahlah>... </ref> then whenever you want to refer to it again use <ref name=blahblah /> - see Citing sources - Footnotes

There is a template just for this situation - it is called More Footnotes so I have changed the RefImprove to a more suitable template for the article.

Video Samples

I've put the videos for the Jazz examples I did for 3:2, 2:1 and 3:1 ratios into the article, all for 4/4. They use the modern drum kit though which is anachronistic, so will do new versions with e.g. stick hit or such like sounds. Any particular requests of rhythms that would be useful as videos? I can do any time signature not just 4/4, and other types of rhythm as well. See Video resources - swung notes for some more examples.Robert Walker (talk) 14:39, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

As you'll see I've put up the videos for the Notes inégales now. Done the 3:1 2:1 3:2 and 7:5 as well as straight - all the examples in the quote I found. Can easily do other ratios and also other time signatures - anyone wish to see more videos in the article? If so what?

Jeremiah Clarke?

Re:

This famous trumpet tune is actually a French baroque work by Jean-Joseph Mouret incorrectly attributed to Jeremiah Clarke.

I've never seen any such misattribution. There is a piece by Clarke called "trumpet voluntary" (aka Prince of Denmark's march, a wedding staple), and another "Trumpet Tune" from an opera, so maybe occasionally people have confused those with the Masterpiece Theatre theme, but I'd like to see some documentation the the Mouret work has been misattributed in any significant way. —Wahoofive (talk) 18:30, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

An alternative approach to Notes Inégales

I've been reading this alternative treatment of Notes Inégales. Does anyone know more about it? It is published work, published in Orphei Organi Antiqui. The ideas are really interesting and personally I find them more convincing than the idea of a strictly uneven approach with all the notes "swung" by exactly the same amount. That always seemed to me a little implausible for early music, that they should be so metronomically exact in the Notes Inégales, and swing every single note by exactly the same amount within an overall metronomic pulse.

Also evidence from mechanical clocks to the contrary isn't too convincing because musical clocks, by their nature, are of course mechanical/ It could just be a limitation of the craftsmen in ability to reproduce the fluidity of human rhythms.

2. The Inégal or Entasis Technique

Entasis is an ancient Greek term meaning tensioning. Speech that is delivered in a metrically perfect manner has the power to cause the listener's brain to shutdown and cease processing the meaning of what is being said...all within a few seconds of hearing such speech. The human brain needs the condition of constant or stable irregularity to remain alert and attentive. Regularity eliminates the feeling of discomfort which chaos, the erratic and irregular, often creates. The balance in tension between the feeling of predictability, which constancy (stability) provides, and the feeling of anticipation, which irregularity and unpredictability creates, is a state of entasis. (The opposite of entasis is stasis or staticness.) In normal human speech, Entasis is brought about by the flow of thought, and this flow is both irregular and constant. So it must be in music.

The French, in the 17th and 18th centuries, understood the importance of entasis; musicians who wrote about inégal were likely referring to this concept. The word actually means rough, irregular, unequal, but the conventional interpretation of the word betrays the real meaning by forcing it to conform to the present fashion for perfect metricallity in performance practice of old music. That interpretation suggests that inégal means perfectly regular “limping.” Had the French writers meant that they might have used the term for limping or the phrase égal inégal

...

Metrical exactitude in musical performance also guarantees that most music is only heard but not listened to. It is the embodiment of slavishness in music, i.e. the music is the slave of the beat when it should be its master, exactly the opposite of what C.P.E. Bach suggested when he wrote that one should "endeavor to avoid everything mechanical and slavish. Play from the soul, not like a trained bird."[6]

This technique is especially challenging in its application, because musicians today are so rigidly trained in metrical regularity. Yet, like the beating of the heart, the musical pulse needs to fluctuate in speed as the emotional content of the music fluctuates. Like the natural shifting accents in speech, musical accents need to shift according to the meaning being expressed. To feel perfect, music must be metrically imperfect... ]

So anyway - seems it also fits the criteria of notability enough to deserve at least a brief mention in this article, perhaps a short section with a heading of its own? I have tried to find other references on the same ideas - but can't find anything else apart from this one article. If more material can be found to back it up, I'd have thought it deserved quite a large section of this article as it is a really interesting approach and idea.

Do say if you know anything about this approach to Notes Inégales, and what you feel about adding a section about it to this article. Also especially interested to know if anyone has any other links and references to this material, also the ideas of Entasis too, and possible link of those Greek ideas to Notes Inégales. Robert Walker (talk) 17:20, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Since there has been no comment, I have just added this section in to the main article. I feel it has to be mentioned, or the reader could get the impression that there is a consensus of opinion in favour of the interpretation shown in the article, which is not the case. It is also an interesting approach with several performers exploring it, as well as the published article about it that I know about (and there may well be other published material on the subject - if you are expert and know of other references please add them :) ) Robert Walker (talk) 01:17, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

References

Link confusion

The straight eighths and triplet images at the top of the page both (irritatingly) link to the same sound clip. The way the images are commented does not make it immediately clear that they are notating a similar thing in different ways (one by simply including the word "swing").

I'd delete the link at the triplet image and make the legend "Triplet notation of the same swung rhythm as notes inégales".

Rather than two seperate links to the same sound clip, which one doesn't understand till having followed both, a comparison of the unswung sound would be more useful. I'll leave this up to someone more of a musical expert than me. Let me know if you fix. I don't watch these days. Trev M  ~  18:21, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Revision

Hello, I'm trying to translate this page for the Italian Wikipedia, but I noticed that some sections and clauses are a bit confusing, sometimes they seem incomplete, as if they had been hastily written. Can someone tell me if it's my fault, or the text really needs a revision? Ptolemaios, from Italian Wikipedia — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.147.211.170 (talk) 00:01, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Media Playback

The media dunt work. Now, if it dunt work on my phone, which is a brand new Sony effort, it probably int going to work on many others. Can't the file format just be mp3, or something like that, that owt can use w'out having to scour the internet looking for something to open it? Ta. SquidSix (talk) 12:07, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

They are MIDI files, which are pretty non-mobile-compatible. —Wahoofive (talk) 21:41, 6 May 2020 (UTC)