On 29 May 2006 at 19:44, Christopher Smith wrote: > On May 29, 2006, at 6:36 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > > In short, there is no hard and fast rule about whether repeats are > > obligatory just because they are found in the score, even if it's > > the composer's autograph. > > Wow. Really? I would have thought that something like a repeat in the > composer's hand would be a sure sign that he intended it.
Certain things are conventional and thus don't mean as much as they might seem. My experience is that a repeat in the composer's hand means that you can repeat here if you like. A lack of a repeat may or may not indicate "don't repeat." It's not terribly cut and dried, because the practices weren't really as codified as we'd like to think. > Wrong notes and other mistakes, of course, might be subject to > scholarly dissection, but a repeat is hard to put in by accident, I > would think. Who interprets the repeat sign? For instance, the NMA almost always puts in exposition and recap repeats, even when they are absent in the autographs. Sometimes Mozart wrote the repeat in the first half and not the second. Did he forget the second repeat? Or did he want only the first half repeated? Sometimes it's possible to tell, sometimes it's not. Sometimes the Mozart autograph has no repeats, but the authentic parts to the same work do have them (and vice versa). One could say "well, the autograph derives directly from the composer, so the that's the authorative source, since the parts were copied from the autograph, and prepared by copyists (under Leopold Mozart's supervision), so not as authorative." Yet, many of these sets of parts were used by Mozart in his concerts in Vienna (he wrote to his father to have them sent to him from Salzburg). So, it seems that maybe the authentic parts are more authorative than the autograph, since those were actually used in performances directed by Mozart himself. My take on all of this is that the real situation is that this was not something that they got too upset about. You could do the repeats or not, depending on the situation. Keep in mind that in Mozart's time it was quite common for a symphony to be broken up over an entire concert, with part of it performed at the beginning of the concert and the finale at the end. You never see that done today, but it was pretty much common practice back then. It doesn't mean they always did it, just that it was OK to perform parts of it separated from the whole. If they could do that, why in the world would they get upset about skipping repeats? -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
