On 7 Feb 2009 at 16:29, Eric Fiedler wrote: > Well, sure, this is what tends to happen when you spend your whole > life researching a subject. You develop opinions. And that's as it > should be. Which is, by the way, probably the way it worked back > then. A performer's preferences were quite certainly the sum total of > his experience over his professional career.
But Neumann's book is not a performance. As a scholar, it was his job to make his sources clear, and to indicate where his judgment was in play more than the evidence of his sources. That he doesn't do well in either of his big tomes on ornamentation. [] > Personally, I have never had too much trouble separating fact and > fiction in Neumann's book, Perhaps that's because you have first-hand knowledge of the same sources he was drawing on? > and have also enjoyed the controversies he > has fathered - as I remember, the "inégales" one was particularly > ferocious - but he doesn't cover all the sources with the same degree > of thoroughness, and it is certainly a good idea to look at other > compilations of the same material for other points of view and > evaluation of the surviving evidence. And the points that all these > books have in common could well be the closest to the truth that we > can ever hope to arrive at. I think it's better to start with original sources, and then go to modern scholarly works to see how others have tried to work through the ambiguities and contradictions found in all the original sources. I know that's hard for many performers to swallow, since they very often just want to look up a composer in the index and find out the one true way to do things. That's too bad, since the choices are actually much richer and variable (and individual) than any scholarly tome is ever going to be able to indicate. -- 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
