On 16 Jan 2007 at 20:18, Kim Patrick Clow wrote: > On 1/16/07, Raymond Horton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Rifkin got some attention with his project, and got the musical > > world thinking about smaller choirs, perhaps, but the one-on-a part > > B Minor Mass is just silly. > > Really? > > Tell that to Paul McCreesh: > > **snip**(from an interview Paul McCreesh gave on his one voice per > part performance of the the St Matthew passion) > > I've always had an instinctive feeling that the fundamental hypothesis > Rifkin proposed was the right one.
That all depends on how McCreesh defines the Rifkin's "fundamental hypothesis." If he defines it as "small choirs instead of large" then I'd agree. If, however, he defines it dogmatically as one-on-a-part, as Rifkin did, then I think it's completely wrong. > I had done these pieces [in the > past] with small choirs, Sounds like he's going with a loose interpretation of Rifkin's argument, rather than the strict one Rifkin was pushing. > as you would expect; I've just become more > hard-line. Really, the evidence seems to be just so overwhelming that > we've got to start rethinking the whole process. The evidence *never* seemed overwhelming to me, since there were always multiple ways to interpret it. Rifkin's argument that one part would never be shared never made any sense to me at all, especially given the time constraints under which many of Bach's works were copied and prepared for performance. > What annoys me in some sense about the whole "Early Music" business is > that ... you know, I have no objection to people performing Bach with > a large orchestra-and-chorus or a small orchestra-and-chorus or > quartet of saxophones. It doesn't worry me in the slightest. It's when > people try and create spurious musicological arguments to justify > things that are basically just musical taste. But McCreesh is here being intellectually dishonest, as it's never been the case that people were arguing for a dogma of large choruses -- instead, they were arguing *against* the dogma of Rifkin's one-on- a-part choruses. When it came to sins of dogma, Rifkin was the offender here. The argument for small choruses was not exactly controversial when Rifkin advanced his argument for one-on-a-part -- it was precisely the certitude with which he argued his case for one-on-a-part that made his hypothesis controversial. -- 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
