On Mon, November 19, 2007 9:05 pm, David W. Fenton wrote: > On 19 Nov 2007 at 20:37, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: > >> So what is expected? That the sophisticates want a skeletal version onto >> which they can hang their ornamentational or chromatic laundry? And that >> the non-sophisticates are given no guidance or suggestion? > > I voted for leaving the score as it is in Dennis's example, since > there's not one thing about it that has any ambiguity at all.
It's ambiguous to the ears of a non-specialist singer. I haven't forgotten how hard it was the first time I sang "Ma bouche rit" and "Io pur respiro" in 1968. I still have my marked-up pages, trying to make sense out of phrases that didn't match barlines, resolutions that didn't resolve, chromaticism that just had to be a mistake, etc. It looked wrong and sounded wrong, just as "Dove Descending" did. And 20 years later I brought a wide repertoire from the Tournai Mass to "Chichester Psalms" and "Dove Descending" to an amateur choir. I know they would have sung both the F-sharp and the E-flat in Dennis's example because it would make sense, wouldn't it? Of course it would! So much so that I inherited random early music from other choir directors with clearly incorrect accidentals added in because they made perfect sense to the non-specialist musician. But only David Bailey has really tried to answer this question: what is wrong with including the courtesies? Is the editor just too afraid to insult the potential sophisticates out there, the folks who see believe "there's not one thing about it that has any ambiguity at all"? Is the editor unsure? And how do you know what's not ambiguous, all these centuries later? You might be informed by scholarship, but you and they might still be wrong. Barbara's ears and eyes tell her what's right -- and she's a modern person, as we all are. What's to be feared in these editorial suggestions of disambiguation? Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
