At 6:41 PM -0400 7/22/05, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 22 Jul 2005 at 18:12, John Howell wrote:
Several writers have hinted at this, but let me say it straight out.
Male sopranos in renaissance music were NOT very often castrati (a
practice the church did not approve of, but did take advantage of),
and were not always boys at churches without choir schools. It
depended on the choir. And if modern voices can, for many singers,
open up the head range and sing comfortably in alto and soprano
ranges, so could rennaisance voices.
Well, you'll also note that soprano parts in the music of that period
seldom goes much above the A on the first ledger line.
Actually there's a pretty clear difference between music that appears
to have been written for boys and music that appears to have been
written for "regular" male sopranos (if I may use that term in light
of the present thread!). In the case of boys,the tessitura and not
just the range extremes lies clearly higher, with the alto, tenor and
bass parts grouped together in a lower tessitura. Unchanged boys can
float in that tessitura. In the case of men, though, that tessitura
is difficult, and the parts lie lower--seldom if ever reaching up to
that A"--and fit more compactly with the lower three parts. Even
Chanticleer's charts recognize that, although their sopranos aren't
bad.
And then there's the issue of clefs and transposition and variable
pitch and chorton vs. kammerton. . .
I debated whether to mention those variables and decided not to, but
you're absolutely right. The whole thing is really confusing, and
I'm not sure there's any concensus even now about how to interpret
certain combinations of clefs.
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
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