On 9/4/07, David W. Fenton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Because they were never used? Or because they got lost? Or because > they didn't need them? > > By itself, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Sure it is. When someone makes the claim 16 member choirs were performing Bach's music, you need the evidence. I didn't mention it, but Parrott also points out that in other genres of music from the 18th century where multiple instruments would play, those parts DO survive, so your explanations about the missing vocal parts doesn't make any sense. All of Graupner's music survives intact, yet most of his cantatas only have one voice per part. Did you read the footnote Parrott commented on about Graupner's audition cantatas for Leipzig? Graupner wrote these pieces expressly for the Leipzig forces, more proof for Rikin's theory. > > > Besides Parrott's monograph gives a detailed listing (pgs 177-187) of > > all surviving vocal parts from Bach's cantatas, and very few of them > > have multiple copies, just single S/A/T/B parts. > > Which doesn't tell us whether or not Bach would object to having 8-12 > singers, only that in many situations, the parts clearly indicate one- > on-a-part performance. Which I think is what Parrott, Rifkin, and now Paul McCreesh are advocating: let's hear the music the way Bach had it performed and according to the documentary evidence. > It's always easy to mine treatises for all sorts of information. It's > much more difficult to demonstrate that the remarks in those > treatises: > > 1. represent anything other than recommendations or theories, and > more important, > > 2. it's difficult to prove that the traditions represented in any > particular treatise are connected with particular repertories. > > Praetorius is much, much earlier than Bach, of course. I mentioned Parrott quotes many other sources, including peers of Bach (e.g. Mattheson). > > Parrott cites many other quotes / sources showing that if there were > > other singers, it was normative to copy out those parts. > > We know Bach performed his cantatas, but do we know that the Dresden > B Minor Mass parts were used in a performance? I thought that there > is no known performance until CPE's Berlin one quite some time after > his father's death. No, the B Minor Mass was performed (or sections of it) in Dresden, I'm not sure what difference versus a complete performance would make in the performance materials of the sections that WERE played. > > And what > > about performance materials in Darmstadt and Frankfurt and Hamburg, > > which have the same disposition, with one vocal part surviving, with > > very few mutliple ones? Parrott raised the question and it's a valid > > one, if there were multiple copies of vocal parts, if you add up Bach, > > Telemann and Graupner's cantata output, we have about 3700 cantatas, > > where there should be hundreds of copies of vocal parts. They just > > don't exist. > > What survives is what survives, not what was. Exactly. No multiple parts for vocalists in three of the leading centers of cantata composition in early 18th Germany. I'm not even bringing up Stolzel or Fasch, who were highly regarded as composers of cantatas. I've seen several Stolzel cantata manuscripts-- they are exactly like Graupner: one voice per part. Yet multiple instrument parts survive (Sonderhausen apparently had better instrumental forces than Bach in Leipzig). > And what was is not necessarily strictly limiting for what would have > been considered appropriate performance forces. But you don't know that. That's making an argument from thin air. Then in another sentence you completely discount what musicians and theorists of the period DO suggest as appropriate! > It's the dogmatic limitation that has always annoyed the hell out of > me, not the assertion that the pieces were performed one on a part in > their original performances. Actually the dogmatic types are Ton Koopman and Christoph Wolff. I saw a video clip recently where they are discussing the Bach/Buxtehude connection (these videos are still available on Ton Koopman's website BTW). They seemed pretty snarky and snide in dismissing Rifkin's theory. Koopman makes some pretty cheap pot shots at Joshua Rifkin and Andrew Parrott in his written rebuttals too, which I found rather disappointing considering how much I admire Koopman. > > Actually the onus is on providing proof that 12-20 member choirs were > > the norm in early 18th century Germany. > > That's a ridiculous straw man -- it's not even close to what anyone > is suggesting in this discussion. Maybe no one here suggested it, but I think I'm reading Koopman correctly that IS his position, or why would he have recorded all the cantatas with exactly those forces?. Thanks! Kim Patrick Clow _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
