On 19 Nov 2007 at 21:31, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: > 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.
If you sing the notes that are clearly indicated on the page, it will come out correctly. > 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? Er, no, it wouldn't make any sense. The notation is completely unambiguous. > 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? I answered that I felt they added nothing that wasn't already clear, and that adding that could cause second-guessing, or at least, momentary confusion. > Is the editor just too afraid to > insult the potential sophisticates out there, I don't know where you come up with an idea like that. > 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? The notes are the notes. There's no hint of ficta here. > 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? They are completely unnecessary. Your argument would suggest that every single note should have a courtesy accidental, and that's absurd. To me, it's absurd to add any to this particularly musical example. There are plenty of cases where I would disagree -- my consort had a bitch of a time working out correct notes in a Schein piece that we are playing (it's for 4 viols and tenor), and what we found out was that the written-in accidentals apply for only half measures (it's in 4/2). The editor didn't do anything to resolve that ambiguity, and it would have been quite helpful to have added the courtesy accidentals (and some really weren't "courtesy" but obligatory). The point is that there is no need to disambiguate that which is not ambiguous. But where there *is* ambiguity, courtesy accidentals help save an enormous amount of time and effort. -- 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
