On 6 Nov 2005 at 11:50, Andrew Stiller wrote: > On Nov 5, 2005, at 3:20 PM, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > > > On 05.11.2005 David W. Fenton wrote: > >> Johannes and Dennis C., and any others who edit older music, do you > >> think there's anything in the beaming angle of the original sources > >> that might be worth preserving? > > > > No. > > > >> Do you also try to preserve the beaming breaks and reversed beams? > > > > Beaming breaks yes, reversed beams no, with exceptions. > > I'd have to agree with this.
Why would one keep the beam breaks and then discard most of the reversed beams? How do you know you're not discarding potentially useful musical information? I've played from original notation and, despite the fact that it's using notational standards completely different from our own, reversed beams are *not* one of the areas where those old conventions are harder to read (unlike the lack of vertical alignment, or the placing of whole notes in the center of measures, for instance). And it seems to me that reversed beams (and clef changes) often denote things like change of register, which is also often a change of voice within an implied polyphonic texture. Of course, in older notation, especially in MS, the problems of reversed beaming were fixed by fudging the beams, curving them in MS (to give that incredibly beautiful flowing look that you see in Bach's MS, for instance) or by tightening the space between the beams in engraved music. We don't have either of those alternatives available to us in modern computer notation (though I guess it's possible to tweak the beam spacing, though I've never mucked around with that), and, as in the example I gave, it sometimes looks bad and/or is hard to read. But in the repertories I work with often (late 18th-/early 19th- century keyboard chamber music, early 18th-century French vocal music, 17th-and 18th-century German vocal and viol music), cases where the reversed beams are hard to read or look really bad are actually quite rare. And there are plenty of cases where it looks *much* better than the modern alternative, such as large leaps constituting a change of register of well over an octave. Most of those will be better accomplished in modern beaming by breaking the beam, but I think it's better to make *no* changes in the original notation, rather than making two to represent the same thing. Of course, my goals in engraving are not the same as Andrew's are -- he's a publisher, I'm an editor, and if I were publishing my editions I'd probably take out the reversed beams that looked bad (though I'd note it in the critical notes). I strongly believe that beaming is an area with a lot of information in it that most people tend to ignore when engraving, even though performing musicians get all kinds of subtle cues from it when playing. I covet every tidbit of that subtle information and want it to get into the performance, so I'm not about to bleach it out of my edition without careful consideration. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
