On 29 Jan 2006 at 20:18, John Howell wrote: > At 10:53 AM +0000 1/29/06, Owain Sutton wrote: > > > >Some good points, perhaps, although I think you need a bit more > >evidence before making such claims about Dufay or Josquin with such > >certainty! > > In DuFay's lifetime the popularity of one's music can be measured by > the number of manuscripts containing that music, and his is in lots of > them. . . .
Er, no, that's not true. We have no way of knowing exactly why certain music survived and other music did not. We cannot say infer "popularity" from the surviving repertory because we can never know the content of what was lost. This is the flip side of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Perhaps it could be stated as "distribution of surviving evidence does not necessarily exhibit the same proportions as the original evidence." I have a certain suspicion that much of the music that survives is in sources that nobody ever *used* for anything. This suspicion comes from the large number of archival MSS and printed editions that I've worked with that include numerous errors that have never been corrected. This indicates that the sources could never have actually been used for a performance (wrong notes, missing measures, incorrect rhythms all uncorrected). This leads me to suspect that some portion of these survived precisely because no one cared enough about them to have ever used them. As we all know, music that is often used shows it. Of course, those observations apply to music from the 18th century on, but it always gives me pause when I consider the survival of sources from even earlier periods, before printing, for instance. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
