I agree that one is getting into murky areas if one decides editorially to
change Mozart's notation, and update it to modern conventions generally; but, as
a composer, I would every time prefer the modern notation, which seems to
reflect more accurately what is intended to be played, without there having to
be an understanding of conventions such as "play an appoggiatura in such and
such a way, even though it's not written like that". I prefer to avoid letting
the correct interpretation of my notation be based on such conventions when I
can do so clearly.
I suppose most would agree with me on this instance of appoggiaturas: I
very rarely, if ever, see appoggiaturas written in Mozart's way in music of the
last 200 or so years.
The key words in the above are "as a composer." I wouldn't use long grace notes (which is what appoggiaturas so notated are called) myself in a piece of mine unless it were a matter of stylistic quotation, but for editions of old music it would be a very bad mistake to edit them out.
However, they are not quite so rare as all that "in the music of the past 200 years." They are quite frequent in 19th c. vocal music, and by no means unheard of in the 20th--there are several in _Carmina Burana_, frinstance.
Every performing musician is taught the "standard" way to play long graces (give the note its full notated value, subtracting same from the following large note), and for that reason anyone who wants to write one in a new piece, for whatever reason, need have no hesitation in doing so, provided that convention is followed. Ironically, 18th-c. music (which is what we think of when long graces are mentioned) doesn't always follow this convention, but uses others that vary in different styles and even from composer to composer.
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In response to a different part of this thread, one reason to retain old notations in editions of old music is that the appearance of the music on the page strongly affects what one expects to hear, or even how one's eye scans the page, and the use of contemporary notational conventions in an old piece can be quite disorienting to the reader. That is why horn players prefer to see old horn parts with all the original transpositions, and not with everything transposed to F. In the 19th-c. orchestral music that I publish, I insist that the percussion parts be shown as in the original scores: each instrument on its own, 5-lined staff, with a treble or bass clef and the notes placed on the C space. I do this because that is how 19th-c. percussion music looks in virtually all existing published scores, and seeing the instruments on single lines, or sharing a staff, or w. different-shaped noteheads, etc. makes one expect the part to somehow embody 20th-c. performance conventions as well.
In a much more recent repertoire, I find John Sinclair's editions of Ives to be quite difficult to study because they look as if they'd been composed by, say, Eliot Carter. I'm sure they're much easier to play than Ives' across-the-barline tuplets, but they don't look like Ives on the page, and it's extraordinarily difficult to get a real feel for the music from them.
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Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
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