At 1:29 PM -0400 9/3/07, Kim Patrick Clow wrote:
On 9/3/07, John Howell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I ran across something similar in a 17th or 18th century context
(18th, I think, and English), with the soprano written very high.
Turned out that the only credible answer was to assume that it was
intended for, but not labeled for, male chorus.
I can tell you from my experiences with Sibelius software, voice
ranges were somewhat different back in the period your discussing. For
those that aren't aware, Sibelius will change the color to a shade of
red when the note falls outside of what the normative range of a voice
or instrument is.
And a lot of that is that "altos" (which after all does mean "high
ones") were still considered male voices, a carryover from 15th
through 18th century church practice when women were not permitted to
sing in church. I remember several years ago, someone on the
ChoralTalk List reporting on an early 19th century choral performance
in Boston which had an extensive writeup in the paper. All the names
of the sopranos were prefaced with "Miss," "Mrs.," or "Master," while
all the names of the altos were prefaced with "Mr."
When I first started to use the software, I asked my editor about
this. I was told that basically the vocal range of the 18th century
was a bit larger than what the software considers "normal" by current
standards. I have been working on a cantata by Graupner, "Nun danket
..." where the bass singer was apparently not able to perform, so the
tenor's part was composed at a very low range, in fact most of the
notes for this tenor part show up in red on my Sibelius score.
This is a particular problem in editing and performing 15th and 16th
century sacred music, always written for either boys or high men on
the Superius, males on the Altus, Tenor, and Bassus. Very often the
Altus and Tenor cover basically the same range and cross freely, and
a modern mixed choir is the wrong instrument for that music. The
female contraltos simply don't have the range for those parts, and
the moment you raise the pitch of your edition you are putting added
strain on the tenors.
I know Andrew Parrott suggested Vivaldi's Gloria was written for an
all girls chorus and suggested the bass parts were sung by transposing
their parts up an octave (or who knows, maybe even higher). There's a
great recording of this on Virgin Classics I believe.
The conventional picture of Vivaldi is that he spent his entire
career at L'Ospidale working with the girls and young women there,
but the more I learn about his life the more I realize that he also
traveled widely, wrote and produced his own operas, and his SATB
choral works were probably intended for SATB performance and not by
the girls. Parrott's hypothesis appears to be just that, like the
hypothesis that Bach intended his cantatas to be performed one on a
part, but copied extra vocal parts just for the heck of it!!
John
--
John R. 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
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