On 31 May 2006 at 7:40, Erica Buxbaum wrote: > That said: Christopher Hogwood and many other performers who are > attempting to discover what "the composers' intention really were" > rely on information from contemporary sources regarding as many > aspects of performance as are available, among other things. There > actually are contemporary sources that say quite clearly that > repeats are to be observed in da capos. I'm sorry I can't recall who > this was at the moment--it may have been Koch.
I think it's up to those making the case for all repeats in the da capos to provide citations. Of course, that raises all the caveats about how treatises are not necessarily representations of actual practice, but of how the author of the treatises wishes practice to be, and that all treatises are limited in applicability to the traditions in which they were written (both chronological and geographic), and that most treatises were 20- 50 years behind actual practice, since they are inherently conservative. But once we have some affirmative evidence on the table, it then becomes the responsibility of those like me (who find the categorical application of da capo repeats to be much too inflexible to represent historically informed performance practice) to then find contradictory source evidence. Also, Hogwood and his ilk often vastly overstate the applicability, reliability and specificity of the evidence they adduce. It is often the case that statements in the early music world get repeated to the point that they lose their original context and are taken as gospel. That is, the modern early music movement has its own oral traditions that have little if anything to do with the historical traditions that they are ostensibly trying to recreate. This was one of Taruskin's valid criticism, by the way. -- 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
