On the simplest level, this is about consonance and dissonce. Most people play French baroque music as consonance, but the extraordinary length of the ornaments, when played properly, make it dissonance. It is the most dissonant music in early music; which makes it, to my ear, both unusual and beautiful. I have no objection to anyone preferring to remove the dissonance, but I don't think it is a trivial or purely academic issue. There is also a connection, most readily seen in Charpentier, between the agreements and the figures.
I recently heard a recording of Corelli's Christmas concerto. In one place, there are some sharp dissonances written only in the figures of the organ part. That is, there were no string parts sounding these notes. These notes were not played on the recording; for whatever reason, they were left out. It sounded perfectly beautiful. But I would never play it like that, unless I simply did not understand them. dt At 05:26 PM 6/28/2008, you wrote: >As Ray Nurse said yesterday (and I know he was quoting somebody else) >"talking about music is like dancing about architecture". > >On Jun 28, 2008, at 8:20 PM, howard posner wrote: > >>Professor Harold Hill wrote: >> >>>all this 'quibble' about how to play music is interesting but >>>pointless. >> >>True enough. There's nothing more pointless than musicians who want >>to know what they're doing. >>-- >> >>To get on or off this list see list information at >>http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html >
