On 15 Jan 2011 at 14:41, Eric Fiedler wrote:
> It's not that difficult. Try giving your viol ensemble facsimiles of
> the original parts (without barlines of course) and then " while
> playing " each player marks and/or _remembers_ the main cadences,
> which are then used as rehearsal marks.
This would eat up a HUGE amount of rehearsal time. We have to spend
enough time on the musical aspects of fitting things together without
that.
Secondly, the singers would have to spend a huge amount of time
deciphering the Fraktur and figuring out which notes the syllables
actually belonged under.
Were we to ever again use original parts (we did it once 20 years
ago, with very simple 4-part music that was barely contrapuntal, and
the Tenebrae group that I was in 5 years ago also performed from
copies of the facsimile of the Charpentier that we did -- I was the
only one who didn't, since I had not free hands to turn the
voluminous numbers of pages), it would have to be from edited parts.
I think it would be fine for small pieces, but for a 25-minute work,
as in the present instance, it just wouldn't work, in my opinion.
And, of course, defining where the cadences are and putting in
rehearsal marks there doesn't solve the problem of how to start at
points between the cadences, in order to work out problems that occur
there.
> You can be pretty sure that
> this is the way they did it back in the good old days " and (very)
> occasionally one finds such markings in the parts.
Well, the Fraktur problem is likely not one the people at the time
would have had an issue with, and I'm sure there are lots of other
things that would have made it substantially easier for them, such as
an innate sense of the musical style that came from living in an age
in which you mostly made music in only a couple of well-defined
musical styles with well-known and familiar conventions. They
wouldn't need to be told where cadences where
> That there are not
> more of these is surely due to the fact that (1) musicians seem to
> have seldom carried pencils or other writing instruments with them,
> and (b) they had better memories than we do, living in an only
> partially alphabetized world. I have been using this trick for years
> with my ensembles " even with children " and it works perfectly. We've
> taken to calling such markings "now places" ("Jetzt-Stellen"), as
> someone, usually the leader, has to shout "now!".
I'm sure it's a helpful thing in some respects, as I know that my
group plays differently when playing from parts than when playing
from score (it takes me longer to learn the piece when working from a
part, but I more quickly understand how my part fits into the texture
because I have to LISTEN to get it instead of LOOK). It's usually
faster to work from score, but I feel like I play better ensemble-
wise when playing from parts.
This feeling doesn't seem to extend to all the members of our group,
unfortunately! I've been shocked to note people who get lost and
can't find their place when reading from SCORE (and it has included
players whose principle instrument is keyboard, so it's not something
about being hardwired to not read from multiple staves), so I'm not
surprised at anything.
No, the score and parts need to be as clear and unambiguous as
possible so that rehearsal time is taken up with getting the notes
off the page, not figuring out how the notes on the page relate to
each other. I'm sure that if we played from original notation all the
time, we'd develop lots of useful skills and it would be much easier,
but I don't see any point in time at which we could take of a year or
so of no performances and make the transition.
--
David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/
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