On 17.01.2007 dhbailey wrote:
Raymond Horton wrote:
So McCreesh's "instinctive feeling" trumps the evidence of Bach's 12 voice
choir, plus his preference for a larger one?
RBH
[snip]
Well, certainly! Isn't that what musicology is all about? Starting with a
preconception and then finding evidence to support it, while ignoring other
evidence? :-)
I am not so sure who this is targeted at, but I get the feeling you get
it the wrong way round. McCreesh is certainly not making his feelings
into the main argument, on the contrary he is taking the latest research
by Rifkin, Butt and Parrot, and finds that conventional thinking has no
evidence at all, but instead the evidence for tiny forces is
overwhelming and can't be ignored.
I find that anybody's pronouncements in the 21st century of what Bach "really"
intended back in the 18th century to be just so much pissing into the wind.
So what are you saying, exactly: it makes no difference, or we should
keep it to what Bach actually had. In which case we are back to the
single voice choir, or at most, two per part for the repieno.
They're ALL just suppositions since we can't know the tempos or the tuning
pitch that each performance was given at. And we certainly can't know what
Bach really envisioned in his mind as he worked with the forces at his
disposal. He might have wanted 50 or 80 and not just 16, but the reality of
the situation told him that the most he could hope for might be (if he were
really lucky) 16 so that's all he ever mentioned.
Hang on, we do know quite a bit more than you think: There is a great
deal on tempi in Quantz. We _do_ know the exact pitch of the organs Bach
had at his disposal (this is a lucky coincidence, most north German
organs were measured in Bach's time.
Unfortunately the fine line between facts and interpretation often gets
obscured in both directions, making it difficult for the non-expert to
see the difference. There is no certified label for a historically
correct performance (actually there isn't such a thing, but we should at
least try to come close).
Johannes
--
http://www.musikmanufaktur.com
http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de
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