On 28 Jun 2006 at 12:55, John Howell wrote: > At 4:00 AM -0500 6/28/06, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > >Lon Price wrote: > >>I'm working on a piece by Paganini for a client, and his handling of > >>tuplets got me wondering about the standards for notating them. This > >>piece is a theme and variations, and when he writes sextuplets the > >>first two show the numbers, and then he leaves them off, which I > >>know is common practice. > > > >I am of the opinion that some of the "conventions" of notation are > >actually typographer's conventions, dating from the period when music > >was generated with handset type. Leaving off the numeral in all but > >the first few tuplets might be (though I do not have definitive > >information to confirm whether it is or is not) might be an example > >of this. In this instance, the typographer had a insufficient > >quantity of the italic numeral 6 to mark every tuplet, and so marked > >just enough of the tuplets to indicate the first ones, even if > >Paganini had religiously put a six in each and every sextuplet. > >Similarly the use of sixteenths instead of thirty-seconds may be > >dictated in this instance by typographical considerations. > > I may not completely understand the flow of technological changes, > which is why I ask this question. The "period when music was > generated with handset type," to the best of my knowledge, was the > 16th and early 17th centuries. . . .
There was also Breitkopf's new typesetting in the 18th century, which was used by B&H (I just saw such an edition yesterday) and also by some publishers in Berlin who bought type from Breitkopf. But it was definitely the minority in the 18th century, and did not last into the 19th, so far as I'm aware. > . . . By Paganini's lifetime (1782-1840), > was music not being printed from engraved copper plates? And real > engraving, with a sharp steel implement, not punched? If so, anything > that could be engraved could be placed on the printing plates. Cutting plus punches. Numbers would likely be put in with punches, not with a cutting tool. Of course, lithography also arose during Paganini's lifetime, and that was sometimes done from engraved originals. > My own take, having spent much of my life hand-copying music, is that > dropping the tuplet numerals once the note values and bowing have been > well established for a passage is simply a time-saving shortcut of the > kind that hand-copyists had been using for a very long time, and are > still using for hand-copied music. I would agree. And engraving is very much like hand copying in a number of ways, much more so than it is like typesetting. -- 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
