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Music: Practice & Theory

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    Put a rest in: the poor singer needs to take a breath in somewhere!
    – Tim
    Commented Sep 12, 2022 at 13:44
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    @Tim (That's a good next-level point: notate it as a dotted half and a singer will probably take roughly the final beat as a breath anyway. I make this point often when talking about articulation, staccato, etc: The note duration doesn't really tell you "how long the note lasts." Not really, not most of the time. Instead, they tell you "how long until the next note starts." Sometimes choral directors will make a point about sustain, or infinite-sustain instruments like organ can care about cutoff. More often, though, we taper, we breathe, we articulate, and rhythm is composed of attacks.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Sep 12, 2022 at 14:01
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    I would instead say that the note duration literally does indicate how long the note lasts, but individual singers/players/directors can choose to override the score's information for practical purposes like breathing. As an experienced choral singer, I promise that I want all choral singers to default to "sing the note for the exact duration indicated unless explicitly told otherwise" :)
    – Greg Martin
    Commented Sep 12, 2022 at 20:37
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    That's a false frame. Experienced singers know there are lots of possible ways and places to breathe, and thus they also know that they need to follow the specific choices of the conductor so that the ensemble sings as one.
    – Greg Martin
    Commented Sep 12, 2022 at 22:10
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    And my take on @phoog's point is that it's not so much that the pros don't care about togetherness—it's that, the more fluent they are in their convention and with each other, the less they have to talk about it. You hear less "but how swung are these 8ths? are they more or less than two triplets," and a lot more "You'll know it when you hear it"—and they do. From Duke Ellington to Jordi Savall. (But I guess if you don't yet, you just have to put in the time, and talk about it, until you do....)
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 22:52