Quote:
Originally Posted by brahmz118
Yes, what stanron wrote is very true. Dotted 8th + 16th is very often a shorthand for triplet time - and the strict playing of the dotted rhythm would be considered incorrect performance practice. There's really no basis to argue with this if you look at the literature and the authentic performers.
Here's some Eubie Blake for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHJyE4U0t_8
Historian / musician Terry Waldo created the official transcriptions in the 70's, though Blake had been composing rags since the early 1900s. In Waldo's edition - he explains in the preface that the dotted 8th + 16th is meant to played as triplets, and that this is a tradition in jazz and ragtime notation. So all those swingy passages are notated as dotted rhythms.
Obviously this doesn't mean that -every- instance of a dotted 8th + 16th is meant to be interpreted in this way. But it's easy enough to tell when that's the case. Again, look at the literature. This is a well-established convention. |
Thanks - that was always my understanding, but good to have more evidence. (To be fair, this means I should not have accused the notation of being "wrong", as I first did. It's simply following this tradition. It's only "wrong" if one believes notation should always be literally accurate, and if one interprets the dotted 8ths as
literally that.)