On 4 Sep 2007 at 17:35, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > You probably conduct choirs, > and because Joshua's theories rob you of the whole Bach repertoire you > simply assume there must have been large choirs?
That is as ludicrous an accusation as you accuse John of making. The dispute is not between large choirs (30 singers?) and one-on-a- part ensembles, but between small choirs (8-12) vs. religiously and slavishly insisting on one-on-a-part in all cases. It's quite clear that small groups of singers (fewer than 15-20) were the norm, but not at all clear to me that Rifkin's interpretation of the evidence proves that we should abandon 8 and 12-part performances in favor of 4 and fewer. Bach might have done any number of things had he the personnel. And the number of parts in the Dresden set doesn't tell you anything - - it is always the case that when sending a set of parts you copied out a single part for each independent part, and left it up to the recipient to create the doubling parts. This is the reason so many part sets have various paper types and different copyists in them, precisely because the original copyist created only the minimum number of parts to convey the complete musical texture, not the desired number of parts for a performance. -- 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
