Overdotting
Overdotting is a term from music performance practice that defines the reproduction of a musical text by a musician.
A dotted note is overdotted if it is executed in such a way that its time is lengthened over the specified duration at the discretion of the interpreter and the time for the following note is shortened accordingly. For the musical text 
z. B. 
played. The time weights can also be shifted to a greater or lesser extent and need not be represented in the usual music notation. Overdotting is also used when a musical text is 
reproduced as if e.g. B. 
would be noted.
During playback of a musical text 
as 
often happens when swinging is even demanded of play, the obvious analogue term "Unterpunktierung" has not enforced this.
Overdotting in our musical tradition
The overdotting of individual notes as a special form of rubato has been demonstrable since at least the 18th century. Even today it is an often used design tool.
In baroque music , all dotted notes were overdotted in the pieces of music known as “ French Overture ” . Thus it says in Johann Georg Sulzer's General Theory of Fine Arts of 1771: “The main notes are mostly punctuated, and in the lecture the points are sustained beyond their validity. After these main notes follow more or less smaller ones, which have to be played at the utmost speed [...]. "
It is controversial among musicologists whether and to what extent this practice also extended to other pieces. The reason it was so difficult to determine how it was played back then is because the musical notation was slow to develop. The use of double dotting is known to us for the first time from Johann Joachim Quantz . Before, it was generally accepted that “you can't really determine the time of the short note after the point”.
literature
- Music in the past and present (MGG), keyword "lecture"
- Robert Donington: The Interpretation of Early Music. Revised version. Faber & Faber, London 1977, ISBN 0-571-04789-0 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Johann Georg Sulzer: General theory of the fine arts. 2nd part, 1st volume. Heilmann, Biel 1777, p. 388 ( digitized in the Google book search).
- ^ Willi Apel: Harvard dictionary of music. 2nd Edition. Harvard University Press, 1972, ISBN 0-674-37501-7 , p. 242 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- ↑ Johann Joachim Quantz: Attempting an instruction to play the flute traversiere . Voss, Berlin 1752, §21 ( online at Wikisource ).