On 6 Nov 2005 at 10:56, John Howell wrote: > In my own editing, my goal is to make the music > intelligible to modern singers while retaining as > much as possible of what I consider important in > the original. In renaissance vocal music this > includes removing bar lines (and eliminating ties > across those bar lines) but putting the music in > score, reducing note values to make it look as I > want it to sound, and beaming across 8ths and > 16ths rather than using the archaic separate > flags. My singers are used to it, and read it > just fine.
To clarify: I was not asking about vocal music. I use modern beaming in vocal music, as well, because it's just much easier for singers to read. This is most easily demonstrated by asking a singer to sightread from some beautifully-engraved early 18th-century French edition. You'll find that the singers *can't* read the music, even though there's nothing at all unclear about the note shapes (as there might be in MS). So, yes, I do the same for vocal music, since I don't feel the non-beaming conveys anything useful that is not quite clear from word continuation symbols along with judiciously-placed slurs. Charpentier's MS is tough in the other direction. For melismas, he beams everything under a single syllable then connects that which can't be beamed together (such as 8 16ths and a quarter) with a single slur. This is so different from modern convention (i.e., using beams to accomplish exactly what we'd use slurs for) that I don't even try to replicate it. But in instrumental music, beaming breaks and reversed stems seem to me to suggest information about articulation, accentuation, phrasing and bowing. And I leave them as is (even when clefs are changed, on which point I differ with Dennis, though there are cases where I will remove the reversed stem if it obviously cannot convey any such additional information) even if it violates modern engraving conventions (which I basically don't give a rat's ass about) and even it if looks a little unusual. The potential informational value is more important to me than uniformity of appearance, and I can hardly think of circumstances where it makes the music harder to sightread. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
