Abstract
The History of modern notation is the history of the stupefaction of our musical world which, enriched by an ever greater number of unmusical people (listeners, performers, and composers), has come to need a proportionate amount of superfluous information—superfluous, that is, for anybody who understands the music in the first place. Complex and problematic cases apart, Bach was still able to rely on our insight to the extent of letting the sheer structure of a piece dictate its tempo—whereas nowadays, the not so musical amongst us are unhappy without metronome marks, while the rest of us are unhappy about them. Again, Mozart's dynamics are extremely economical; many a dynamic change is firmly implied without being notated, and if we confined ourselves to his notated dynamics, an impossible, underplayed performance would be the result—which, in due journalistic course, would be described as ‘stylish’ by our critics.
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