On 27 Oct 2008 at 15:55, Eric Fiedler wrote: > 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, > see, for example, the printed edition of Frescobaldi's Ricercari et > canzoni francese printed in 1615, the famous edition of Gesualdo's > madrigals printed in 1613 or the manuscript scores in Lowinsky's > article on scores in the Renaissance.)
I wish our performers would learn the original notation and sing/play from the partbooks. If you've ever tried it yourself, you know how illuminating it can be. You get away from the tyranny of the barline that scores impose (something that was just as true in the 17th century as it is today, which is why citing contemporary keyboard scores with barlines really says nothing at all about how best to notate the music today), and can then free up the individual parts to be as polymetric as they need to be. Yes, it's devilishly difficult to perform from parts with minimal (or no) barlines, but I think the musical result is quite great. I also think that performing from parts (instead of score) is a great way to improve the listening skills of the performers, since you don't have the crutch of seeing what is being (you have to *listen* for it). So, to me, the problem here is that we insist on performing from scores, and that creates the artificial problem of barlines that interrupt the flow of the individual lines. Part books survived well past the "invention" of the score for a good reason -- it conveyed the musical content much more efficiently than scores that imposed barlines that contradicted the inner meter of individual, independent parts. -- 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
