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Title: Look elsewhere first
Review: Certainly one is entitled to praise this book if one feels it warrants praise. It is rather much, however, to call everyone who feels otherwise unserious and ungrounded. Well, this book is more extensive than most music notation books, and that is worth something. On the other hand, 1) it misunderstands rhythm--as the grounded and serious and often performed composer Paul Creston points out (much more often performed, by the way, than the author of this book) and 2) for most "extended techniques" there generally is no standard notation, as a glance at "New Music Vocabulary" by Howard Risatti will demonstrate.The supercilious composition student (or soi-disant "serious, grounded composer") can learn much about rhythmic notation from Paul Creston's "Principles of Rhythm", yet I recommend Paul Creston's "Principles of Rhythm" for all musicians of all temperaments. (I don't recommend his "Rational Metric Notation", by the way--another story.)
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