At 10:59 PM 10/6/03 +1000, Michael Edwards wrote: > However, an anomaly exists in the score for this piece, at least in my >edition: there are just *two* bars in the middle of the piece which are marked >"senza Ped.". > Now, in good conscience, what should I do here? Follow the instruction >because the score tells me to, and produce a performance that sounds ridiculous >and uncomfortable to me, out of keeping with the spirit (as I perceive it) of >Scriabin's music?
This is definitely a legitimate inquiry, though. I don't know Scriabin by score or manuscript, nor how he was engraved or edited, but let's look at the five typical options: 1. Scriabin meant what he wrote and you have yet to figure out why (such as a 'missing' chord resolution in one of the early Beethoven sonatas that one pianist 'plays' as a ghost chord by touching the keys but not actually making a sound). 2. Scriabin meant the marking as a joke or commentary (or trick for a particular performer he knew), and analysis of the piece and its history will reveal that, and thus how to play it (or ignore it). 3. Scriabin meant something else (such as "sfp"), and the engraver read it wrong (thinking, perhaps, it was s/p or sz.p.), and it was missed in proofing and performance over the years, depending on how (un)popular the work was. How many errors have progressed this way from edition to edition? (When I was in high school in 1965, playing bass clarinet [ah! back on topic!], we had a dog-eared copy of Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' that had been used for at least 30 years ... and I was the first player to notice a D# that was marked as a C#. Just for fun, I checked, and a few years ago the band edition was still published.) 4. Scriabin made a mistake that he never bothered fixing before it went to the publisher, the editor didn't think anything of it or wasn't really paying attention that morning, and the proofs got by everybody. 5. Scriabin was uninvolved, as somewhere along the line in the offset printing days, a sticky bit of "senza Ped" fell or peeled off another score and ended up there or, depending on how the "Ped" symbols were repeated, perhaps the "senza" belonged to another symbol. (Can you tell I once worked in pre-computer print shops? And I once received a cashmere sweater instead of a PC Midi card because the UPS label had peeled off my box onto the sweater box. Nice sweater, though.) As a composer, that is precisely what I would look for in an attentive performer: the ability to notice a musical anomaly based on the rest of the information in the score. Performers have caught my typos ... I'm no better than the rest of the sorry lot when transcribing my own scores from paper to Finale. The sort of thing in #5 above happens in computer scoring, too, with keyboard shortcuts when I've had a long day (Omigawd, they're all _ when I meant > -- let me find them all & fix them!) And this is the kind of questioning I would expect, from typos through anomalies, by a performer who, like you, is puzzled by or disagrees with something asked for by the notation. (One performer even addressed a logical failure in the ending of a solo piece I wrote for him, and I re-cast the ending because I realized he had caught me in a compositional stupidity.) That's 'quality' interpretation, and it takes hard work to do that. (I've always felt that if, collectively, performers or ensembles put as many hours in practicing pieces as the composers spent writing them, every performance would be glorious.) I think all of this line of discussion is appropriately rigorous and very different from arguments from performers who choose what to play from among the notational elements based on what is essentially whimsy or some habit of ignoring some sorts of markings as extraneous. I keep obsessing about that 8va, and wonder how many other symbols performers typically consider optional. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
