John Howell wrote:
Possible. In fact, probable, considering his demands on notation. But I've recently worked with a Jean Sibelius score which was actually published as a facsimile of his manuscript score. His hand isn't bad, thankfully, but it isn't perfect, either. The piece was composed in the teens, I think.
Having seen some photos of original Mozart and Beethoven manuscripts, I'm sometimes really happy that they *expected* copyists to take those and flesh them out.
It'd take a VERY complex font set to reproduce that ... scribble, and very good musicians to play it.
Well, in defence of Mozart and Beethoven (who really DID expect the musicians they wrote for to read from their own or a copyist's manuscript, and to sightread at that), that's exactly what you get in the orchestra books for those Broadway shows that have not been updated from the original manuscript onionskins. Same thing for the original productions of operas. And sometimes 3 or more hands in a single book, each worse than the others! Unfortunately, reading hand copy is not a skill we tend to teach our students, either in solo work or ensemble work, and we should.
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
