At 9:21 PM -0400 6/14/06, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
Layers would do it, but I'm not much of a notation expert in how to indicate early music. Most of my knowledge is old scholarship, as I stopped studying early music by the mid-1970s, when all you got was a melody and had to fit the words as best you could.
I'm not sure what this means, but it's on the right track. What one has to understand is that neither copyists nor typesetters were likely to be musicians, composers didn't necessarily oversee copying or printing even when they could, and everyone knew this was the case. A student of Josquin tells us that the first thing he taught his singers was how to set the words to the music! In other words, it was the singer's job, or the leader's job in the case of an ensemble. As Adam's textbook on Renaissance music makes clear, THERE WERE NO LISTS OF RULES FOR HOW TO UNDERLAY TEXT!
The best way to approach it is this. Remember that the composer started with the words, so that's where you have to start. He (seldom she) composed the music to fit the words. Therefore it is important to sing the various possibilities and decide among the many different possibilities, trying to match word stress to music stress. It helps if you're actually a singer with a lot of experience, and if you actually sing it aloud, but someone with a lot of experience can do this mentally as well (as I usually do). And of course each verse presents its own possibilities and its own necessities for decision making, just as it did for the singers it was written for! In this it's very much like folk music, in which the melody is adjusted as needed to fit the number of syllables in each line of the lyrics.
John -- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
