On 15 Feb 2006 at 8:19, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > On 15.02.2006 David W. Fenton wrote: > > 2. the legal reasoning behind the decision is specious. Sawkins > > cannot be both a musicological editor and a co-composer of the > > works, > > Of course he can: I am working on a piece where the middle parts are > missing. They need to be recomposed. (Not by me though, but by the > editor).
Recomposed or reconstructed? Sawkins constructed one viola part in one piece, and supplied figures to an incompletely figured bass in another case. He also supplied corrections of erroneous notes. Reconstructing multiple missing parts does, in fact, seem to me like recomposing. But reconstructing a single inner part and supplying figures for a bass line seem to me to not be composing at all, because the choices are very highly circumscribed, and in the case of the figured bass, not in any way creative (you need only look at the harmonies in the other parts to decide the exact figures, and very frequently, missing figures were understood in context without needing to be figured at all; adding figures to the bass line is no more "composing" than adding roman numerals on a harmonic analysis exercise for a theory class). The case even considered a different edition of the piece with the reconstructed viola part and observed that the two reconstructed parts were identical in almost all respects. But rather than concluding the obvious (that this was natural, since both editors were acting in service of de Lalande's original inspiration), the judge instead took the very few differences between the two reconstructed parts as evidence of compositional creativity and declared that the half dozen or so different notes entitled Sawkins to be considered as de facto co-composer of the work. If the editor's goal is to reconstruct the composer's original, how can the editor be anything but the slave of the original composer? The case of reconstructing several missing parts is quite different, though, especially in Baroque music where the outer voices might be missing. With a viola part in an orchestral and choral work with continuo, there really isn't any "composing" going on at all, seems to me. -- 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
