At 3:55 PM +0100 10/27/08, Eric Fiedler wrote:
Hi Noel,
It sounds like you're thinking of something along the lines of Van
Crevel's edition of Obrecht in 1959, where he dispensed with bar
lines completely and just used little wedges above the staff to
denote the tactus (take a look at his edition of Obrecht's Missa Sub
tuum presitium in the Opera Omnia, for example). I thought this was
a pretty neat idea _ for a while, but it didn't catch on and nobody
uses it today.
I certainly do, but my editions are for in-house use and not for publication.
(Singers don't like it either. For a performance of the above mass,
I once had to draw in bar lines by hand!)
Certainly, but as a teacher I'm interested in teaching my singers to
read music accurately no matter how it's notated, and the only way to
visually see the phrase shapes is to get rid of the doggone bar lines
and ties! It puts the music in a straight-jacket.
I admit to having dabbled in Mensurstrich in my youth, as this was
more or less the politically correct way to notate the polyphony of
the Renaissance when I was a student, but this, too, seems to be
slowly dying out, and I'm pleased to see that Cris Maas' New Obrecht
Edition uses bar lines (staff only) and ties between bars. Which, as
it turns out, was the way musicians of the (late) Renaissance wrote
down their works when they had to put them into score (for organists
or study,
But not for performance, which is my whole point! And those diagonal
barlines in keyboard pieces are almost more trouble to read than
they're worth! The question has to be whether you're willing to
compromise the musical phrasing for the convenience of
incompletely-trained singers, or willing to compromise the singers'
comfort for the sake of the music. My singers have never failed to
do just fine with no-bar-lines music.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
