At 7:26 PM 05/28/03, David W. Fenton wrote: >Clefs have always been considered as having no musical meaning. > >And I think that's definitely the case after about 1700 or so.
When I mentioned C clefs for alto and tenor in a choral passage, the real-life example I had in mind was a piano-vocal score of a Tchaikovsky opera. I forget which opera it was, but it can't have been earlier than 1870. >I think that ignores a very important consideration. Most old music >that is getting a modern edition made is never going to have another >edition. It's not like Bach, where there are dozens of editions of >almost any piece (more for some genres than others, obviously). In >the case of a piece of old music being edited into a modern edition >for the first time, I think it's crucial that performers and scholars >be accomodated in the one edition, as there really isn't going to be >another chance. > >But I do believe the bias should be toward the scholarly. The >musician who wants to learn rare repertory is likely to do the work >to figure out any idiosyncracies of notation that result from the >editor's efforts to convey a full idea of the possibilities inherent >in the source material. Thanks for the thorough and thoughtful response. What you say makes sense for the sort of music and editions you're talking about. For what it's worth, here's an example of the sort of thing I had in mind: My main musical milieu is the community of opera singers. One ongoing project that I pursue during my (rare) spare time is to occasionally republish an out-of-print opera excerpt which I feel may be of interest for a concert/recital setting. There's no real money in this for me, of course, since if it were a piece in demand it would already be published elsewhere, but it interests me and it is useful to my colleagues and I can occasionally collect a little bit to recoup some expenses, so that's good enough for me. An example I have in mind is "O chère et vivante image", a lovely little tenor aria from Gounod's /Cinq-Mars/. /Cinq-Mars/ has fallen out of the repertoire for more than a century and it is little known today except for a slightly less obscure mezzosoprano aria. But this tenor aria is a beautiful piece. It is French and it is not too long, it sits slightly lower in the voice than most French tenor repertoire of the same era, and it has a middle-weight lyric style that is more flattering to some tenor voices than other arias in the same approximate range. And, although it's usually wiser to be conventional, there are times when it's nice to sing something that people haven't heard before. For all of these reasons, it is an aria which is of potential interest to a certain small group of singers. At the moment, however, it is not available to them. Most have never even heard of the aria, and those few that do would have trouble finding the music. It doesn't appear in any anthology, and it's not published separately by anyone. (Not even, last I checked, by Classical Vocal Reprints, which is now the main source for this sort of thing.) The /Cinq-Mars/ vocal score has been out of print for ages. I can get a copy of that vocal score through a friend at a nearby university library. I didn't keep a photocopy (this particularly project, like many others, was started once and then shelved indefinitely...), so I'm describing it from memory. The score is, like so many opera vocal scores from the 19th century, very messy. The typography is old-fashioned and unfamiliar looking to the modern eye, the spacing is careless and difficult to read, and other notational choices are carelessly made with respect to readability. Also, although I can't cite any specifics without the score in front of me, if it's like most scores of its type which I've studied, it has more than a few errors in it. You could make a photocopy anyway, and after reading through it a few times you and your pianist would figure it out easily enough, but to type it up fresh would be far neater. This is the sort of edition I have in mind when entering this discussion. Now suppose I notice some peculiar beam and stem directions, or a measure that doesn't add up, or a missing accidental that is obviously intended, or an inconsistency in note length for no apparent reason, or a missing tie that is obviously intended, etc, etc? Where is the benefit in faithfully observing the source? Sometimes it's clearly a typograhical error, sometimes it's probably an idiosyncrasy of the composer or the time, sometimes I can't tell for sure. A Gounod scholar might track down a manuscript, study the composers habits in other music, and so forth, and thus make a more educated pronouncement on what the composer really intended. Maybe some day that may even happen. (I doubt it, given how many other far less obscure operas are still waiting their own critical editions....) Regardless, that's not my project. I just want to make this lovely aria available to singers who might want to sing it. I have no desire to rewrite Gounod according to my own preferences - indeed, I prefer to render him as faithfully as I am able - but I also want to make the music easy to read and presentable to my likely audience. And so I "clean up" the score a little bit, and if in the course of that I wipe out some of the footprints which may have been useful to a scholar-detective, so be it. As I said before, any serious scholar is going to get his hands on the original vocal score and look for himself. Even a non-scholar who has looked at a few 18th century opera scores will easily see that I have modernized the notation (the most obvious clue being that I like to use modern beaming for the vocal line). But in fact, I'll even go a little further than that. The reason this particular example comes to mind is because it includes an interesting issue of key signature. The aria on the whole is in Db major, but in the middle of the main section (which later repeats) there is an interesting little harmonic journey when the Ab becomes a common tone for a move into Fb, then Cb dom, then Db minor, then Bbb, and finally back to Db major. Gounod has chosen to write this according to the harmony, and I understand why he made the choice. Imagining, for the sake of example, that the whole aria were transposed up a half-step into D major, this harmonic pattern would go D-A-F-C7-Dm-Bb-D, and it would look entirely logical. In Db major, it's just as logical, except that it results in an obscene number of flats and double flats. I'm not saying that I think the composer is wrong. In fact, I completely agree with his reasoning. Nevertheless, I'm aware of my audience, and I know full well that if some poor tenor brings this in to an audition where the accompanist is sight-reading the piano part, the pianist is going to fumble all over that section with all the flats. And so I make an editorial decision and write those four bars with sharps instead. Do I thereby do a disservice to the composer, or to the performers? Some here seem to be suggesting that I do, but that's my call nonetheless. I don't include editorial notes on the music itself, though I do generally offer a few lines of notes separately for those who care to look. In this case, I expect I would mention the key change. (My beaming practice is mentioned elsewhere as a general note for all my editions.) I certainly would not, however, list every instance where I switched a stem direction, changed the rhythmic spelling of a rest, cross-staffed a note, or fixed a typographical error. Anyone who cares about details like that is welcome to compare my page with the original for himself. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
