On 18 Apr 2010 at 18:56, Ryan Beard wrote: > Perhaps I should clarify my situation. I'm engraving a piece for > organ > by a dead composer. He has marked dynamics in the music. Sometimes > there's one marking under the top staff only. Sometimes there's a > marking under all three staves. Sometimes there's a marking above > the top staff only, because I assume there wasn't any room to put it > elsewhere.
To me, most of the comments have been spot on for this situation -- you have a MS and no way to definitively recover the intentions of the composer. > Since I don't have much experience with organ music, I don't know if > the placement of the dynamics is the result of a lazy copyist (very > likely considering other aspects of the MS), or if the dynamics mean > something specific to the performer when placed in a particular > location. > > I'd prefer to place the dynamics consistently throughout the whole > work. There are no indications for the stops. While the dynamics may seem "inconsistent" to you, they may be completely consistent with what the composer intended. Now, you may choose to move all dynamics applying to the top staff underneath the staff (but not halfway between the top two staves), but that's not really changing anything. On the other hand, placing a dynamic marking that is only above the top staff in the MS halfway between the top two staves implies that the dynamic marking applies to both staves. To me, that is more likely than not a *change* to the copyist's (if not the composer's) intent. I would suggest you make a list of the places where you perceive "inconsistency" and ask an experienced organist to evaluate them. My bet is that some of them will not be seen as inconsistencies at all. But one caveat about what I'm suggesting about fidelity to the MS: I would consider it desirable in printed music to have the dynamic markings uniformly aligned vertically, rather than haphazardly placed (e.g., above the staff sometimes and below at others). But I would also be careful not to imply things that aren't intended, e.g., placing a marking in a location such that what originally clearly applied to one staff now appears to apply to more than one. In other words, some inconsistencies in the original MS are likely incidental, and don't mean anything, while others are significant. The hard part is distinguishing the two, and I have found that modern editors want to regularize everything so that dynamic markings are vertically consistent. I think this tendency to regularize things vertically (particularly dynamics transferred between instruments in an orchestral score, and, likewise, transferred between staves of an organ part that may be different stops) should be resisted, and all the "inconsistencies" retained. The most significant parts subtleties of the composer's work may be found in those seeming "inconsistencies" (such as would be the case with careful balancing of instrumental groups with different simultaneous dynamic markings), and it would be a shame to wash away those niceties in a futile search for engraver's consistency. -- 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
