On 7 Feb 2009 at 14:30, dc wrote: > I know David Fenton has played several of the very ornate leçons de > ténèbres. What did you do for the ornaments? I heard a concert recently, > and all the singers were obviously making wild guesses as to the meaning of > these signs.
I was not involved in the decisions on how to execute the ornaments. The singers did them in a pretty generic manner, but I felt that one of the singers was very, very unrhythmic, and often got the accent of the dissonant notes completely wrong. You can hear it here: http://dfenton.com/Collegium/Tenebrae/ I wouldn't model anything on what we did. I very much felt that despite the fact that three of the four of us were musicologists and that our coach was musicologist specializing in the Baroque, we were way underpowered on the musicology that we applied to the project. The singers and the harpsichordist all performed from photocopies of the facsimile of the MSS, but I created my own edition, because there were just too many page turns for me to manage. There weren't too many musicological decisions to be made in my part! And I think the two Charpentier Lessons that we did had only 2 or 3 distinct ornament signs in them, though they occurred in different contexts that *should* have caused them to be interpreted quite differently rhythmically (and in terms of dissonance), but there was some disagreement between the singers on this. All told, while I'm pleased with what we did, I think we had a long way to go to approach anything that would satisfy my sense of the historically appropriate (I tried in vain to get us to use temperament ordinaire, and the organ was at A440, so there's lots left to be desired there). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
