On 27.10.2008, at 17:58, David W. Fenton wrote:
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.
I must own almost every facsimile edition printed in the last 50
years — choir books, part books, you name it —and have been using
them with students to make music for a long time now, so I read you
loud and clear.
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,
Bar lines are only tyrants if you let them be tyrants ;-)
which is why citing contemporary keyboard
scores with barlines really says nothing at all about how best to
notate the music today),
No, but it does tell us something about how they did it then — when
they had to.
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.
Of course it is! But once you have learned to do this, you can take
what you have learned with you back to the score and/or parts. And of
course musicians should always play/sing from parts — even singers,
who aren't as used to this as instrumentalists.
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).
Of course.
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.
Nobody here is insisting on _performing_ from scores. But —
unfortunately — there doesn't seem to be much of a market for
Collected Works of a Renaissance composer in parts!
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.
They don't contradict the inner meter if you don't "play the bar
lines" but simply regard them, as did the musicians of the
Renaissance, as an optical orientation. Of course, the ideal edition
would be a score (for study) and parts (in the original notation for
playing). Richard Taruskin tried this with his "Omni Sorte" Editions
a while back, which were very nice. But, again, they didn't catch
on ... and libraries avoid such editions like the plague.
Eric
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Habsburger Verlag Frankfurt (Dr. Fiedler)
www.habsburgerverlag.de
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