On 23 Jul 2004 at 18:10, John Howell wrote: > At 5:50 PM -0400 7/23/04, Raymond Horton wrote: > >I've played "My Fair Lady" twice - once in high school, with the old > >MS parts, and once, about ten years ago, with the Kentucky Opera > >Association (as a regular opera production in the fall-spring season, > >for some odd reason), with the typeset parts, which were, as you say, > >FULL of mistakes. > > > >[snip] > >I prefer the MS parts, if that's all the care they take with the new > >ones. It's a real shame, since they could be corrected so easily on > >somebody's computer. Nobody cares. > > But you know, I'd bet that the typesetting was done from a set of the > manuscript parts, and not from an original full score, so all the old > errors are perpetuated in secula seculorum!
If you've ever coached chamber music from Peters or Breitkopf or other editions that have been around forever, you'll find that the source history of the scores and parts are often divergent. I haven't done tons of chamber music coaching myself, and last summer when coaching Mendelssohn's Op. 1 Piano Quartet, was repeatedly frustrated by the string players playing bowings that didn't make sense based on the score (I was using the piano score, of course). Well, the light bulb eventually went on and I compared the score to the parts, and there were all sorts of bowings in the parts that did not correspond to the score (this was Peters). Some of the bowings were good suggestions in cases where there was no explicit bowings marked, but others were very problematic bowings that replaced simple, straightforward bowings that made much more sense to me -- and when we tried those out, the music came out better, too. It's customary with performing editions of chamber for there to be more bowings in the parts than in the scores, but I think it's very problematic when those are contradictory as opposed to advisory. That is, it's a big problem when an original bowing has been changed, rather than when a passage has been emended to have a bowing where one was absent in the original. I'm coaching Schumann starting next week and will be collating the parts and scores early in the process. Too bad publishers don't really understand how what they are publishing is actually used. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
