On 16 Jun 2006 at 17:22, John Howell wrote: > The best way to approach it is this. Remember that the composer > started with the words, so that's where you have to start. He (seldom > she) composed the music to fit the words. Therefore it is important > to sing the various possibilities and decide among the many different > possibilities, trying to match word stress to music stress.
Well, I would disagree with that. Our modern sense of proper text setting is very different from that of the past, and there are a lot of conventions that modern text setting would not use. A perfect example of that is the English Renaissance practice of "upbeat syllabification." What I mean by that is if you have dotted quarter, eighth, half, and two syllables, modern text setting would like start syllable 1 on the dotted quarter and syllable 2 on the half. But the clear convention of the time in England was to change syllables on the 8th note. Secondly, if you're thinking terms of matching text accent to musical accent, you have to make sure you're not superimposing modern ideas of meter on top of the music. Much music was unbarred, and the barlines that are printed in our scores terribly distort the accent patterns of lines, especially in cases where barlines force ties (e.g., a half note in the original that ends up falling on the 4th beat of a 4-quarter-note bar will end up tied as two quarters, which tends to obscure its original context and meaning). In the case of unbarred originals, I would do the underlay in individual parts with no barlines, and then see how they fit together. That's really the only way that the de facto polymetric nature of much 16th and 17th century music can be realized. -- 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
