At 8:19 PM -0500 1/16/07, David W. Fenton wrote:
I always felt his one-on-a-part dogmatism was ridiculously overstated, but I really don't think one can take the nominal number of choir members as the actual number for performance. I have sung in choirs with nominally 12-16 members that almost never had more than 8 at any particular service.
Yes, we all know THAT problem. There were often Sundays when her 20-voice youth choir had 10 or fewer. When I was directing a college show at Walt Disney World with a cast of 14, we went on a couple of days with only 8 because of sickness or injury. I had a swing couple who knew every track, and saved our butts!!
If I'm remembering correctly, in Leipzig, Bach was also supervising the music in more than one church, and the musicians involved at his own church also had to help out at the others.
I think, if I too remember correctly (no, I wasn't there, although there are days when i feel as if I might have been!!), that the two main churches were St. Tom's and St. Nick's, and there were a couple of smaller ones to which he would send the apprentice boys, probably just to lead the chorales. (The Town Council apparently did not have authority over the university's church or chapel.)
But I don't think we should assume that all the services were at the same time. It seems more likely that it was something like Telemann's situation in Hamburg, where the large scale music was performed at the large churches and then the musicians cut out and divided up to furnish small scale music at the smaller ones. And St. Tom's and St. Nick's also seemed to alternate in having the big music. I think it was St. Nick's turn to have the large Passion the year Bach premiered the St. John, but he finagled to have it done at St. Tom's instead. So the problem is not quite what some might assume it to be, and the working solutions had probably been used for many years before Bach's tenure.
Has anyone actually been inside St. Tom's, to estimate how many singers and instrumentalists would have been sufficient? I doubt it was cathedral-sized.
I think that Bach would have been fine with one-on-a-part performances.
Perhaps not fine, but resigned to it. As you say, sometimes you do what you have to. Let's not forget that while his singers may have been well trained (and the notes on the paper show us exactly how good they were), they were not opera singers with the vocal endurance of world-class athletes, and singing a 3-hour service without anyone else on your part could not have been considered ideal for those boys' voices no matter how well trained.
I just don't think it was his ideal, however often he may have found himself in that situation himself.
I think there's entirely too much evidence that suggests it was not his intention or his ideal, starting with the 2 copies of each vocal part.
John -- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
