Andrew Stiller wrote:
> I addressed this in a posting two days ago to which there has been no
response whatever. Let me repeat": 8vb had *zero* presence in the
> classical world until about ten years ago, if that.
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
Andrew is usually right, so I went back to my dusty boxes and checked
manuscripts from 1967 until I started using Finale in 1993.
I never used "8va" for transposition down. But my manuscripts had three
versions: "8vab" (used in just one manuscript); just plain "8" for up or
down with a starting hook as well as an ending hook (my most frequent
choice); and "8" with an arrow following it to indicate up or down (used
in two manuscripts).
It appears that 8vb had been so completely logical that it had altered my
own memories of what I used.
Tip o' the osmiroid again to Andrew.
Because I also know that Andrew is almost always right, I checked my
old hand-written manuscripts (pre-Finale) and saw that I usually used
8 (or 15) without the letters for octave transpositions up and down.
My memory of how I came to use 8vb is still fuzzy, but this is how I
think it went down:
Finale came out in 1988 and featured the Petrucci font which had 8va
and 8vb characters. For proper playback at the time, it was
convenient to turn those characters into Expressions that transposed
one octave up and down respectively. The difference helped to avoid
choosing the wrong one if you might have wanted to use two versions
of "8" in the Expressions library. (One octave higher and one lower).
When Smart Shapes incorporated the 8va with the dotted extension
line, they didn't play back with the transpositions at first, so many
people kept doing things the old way. When they eventually added the
correct playback, that's when we lobbied the Finale people to add 8vb
as an option so that new scores would match what we had been doing in
Finale up until that point.
I noticed that many of the fonts that came out right after Finale was
introduced also included 8vb and 15mb, just like Petrucci (e.g.,
Crescendo, Grace Notes, Toccata, and Fughetta). The Sonata font had
characters for "8ab.", "8va" and "8vb".
Those fonts all date from around 1988 to 1990 and Sonata is from
1986!, before Finale was introduced.
It might have been computer notation that started the 8vb trend, but
its usage is at least 20 years old.
-Randolph Peters
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