On 24 Oct 2006 at 14:19, John Howell wrote: > I admit that I am puzzled by the coloration in measure 12, since as > realized the black semibreve and breve have exactly the same value as > it they were normally white.
I can answer that one. Black notation was used in these contexts (pre- cadentially) all the time whether needed or not. It was, apparently, a holdover from older practice. It's in the two Carrissimi cantatas I transcribed a couple of years and also used throughout the many Charpentier pieces I've transcribed in the last couple of years. The Charpentier also has some idiosyncratic use of cut time to mean something rather different than how we'd interpret it in modern notation (which is what we'd expect for this period), but that makes perfect sense (he uses 4/2 + 2/2 to get what could have been written as a 3/2 measure (if they'd been able to interpret 3/2 in the modern sense) for the pre-cadential big 3, which I can only see as an effort to put in place a slowdown of motion as something approaching a ritard; see http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Scores/Charpentier- TenebraeLessons.pdf p. 3, second system and forward). It's a case of old practice intruding again on more modern notation, and can really throw you for a loop. The funny thing is that all the performers intuitively did it right and it was our coach who told us we were supposed to interpret according to modern rules. We voted and the performers won. :) -- 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
