Eric and David: Congratulations. You are both right!!! But from
different viewpoints and with different goals in mind.
Immediate performance with limited rehearsal time available is a very
normal situation. I face it with my school ensemble all the time.
It turns into a balance between teaching (how to read unfamiliar
kinds of notation, etc.) and preparation (learning the music to an
acceptable level for performance), and the teaching often gets the
short end of the stick.
A professional ensemble is quite a different story, whether it's Pro
Musica under Greenberg or Chanticleer. When Chanticleer is not on
tour, they can spend full days rehearsing, because that's their job.
(My son was a member for 4 years, so I'm very familiar with their
work.) Same thing for Pro Musica, since they were on annual
contracts. And Eric, I have to question our comment about their
performing from facsimiles. In most cases what Noah found was
photocopied out of various collected works, not facsimiles of
original manuscripts or prints, because that was the only place that
music was available in the '50s and '60s. I've seen a number of
those that they shared with us. Yes, they were skilled in reading
the old clefs, and in fact Arthur Squires, who had dead perfect
pitch, used the clefs to help him transpose when Noah would take a
piece in a higher or lower key. But I was never aware of their
reading from facsimiles.
On the other hand, we had friends at the Schola Cantorum when Tom
Binkley was there, who played in his wonderful medieval band. And
Tom's practice was not only to put facsimiles in front of them, but
to do it ONCE and then take the music away, trying to duplicate the
situation he believed probably existed at the time. So they spent
hours rehearsing, making it up as they went along (very authentic!),
and produced some wonderful recordings. But interestingly enough
none of those students have done much medieval music in their
professional lives.
The bottom line is that we take our performers where they are today,
help them become more skilled in new ways to the extent we can, and
hopefully make them better than they started after a while. But our
culture is performance oriented, and we can't get away from that.
And we can't expect our performers to have grown up with the same
skills the "old guys" did, when they were working, as David
mentioned, within a limited number of thoroughly-understood styles.
As well expect a classical violinist to play jazz with native style,
or a rock singer to excel in Handel.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:john.how...@vt.edu)
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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