At 1:19 AM -0400 3/26/08, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 24 Mar 2008 at 22:49, shirling & neueweise wrote:
of the
thousands of symphonies written up to the mid-late 1800s, how many
still survive?
Of the thousands of orally composed songs of the troubadours, how
many survive today? Actually, NONE OF THEM. But survival says nothing
about anything other than SURVIVAL.
I have to disagree here. SOME trobador songs
survive, despite the depredations of the
Albegensian Crusade. MORE trouvère songs
survive, because they were on the winning side.
But if you mean that they survived in a very
bare-bones notation that tells us absolutely
nothing about how they might have been actually
performed, then of course you're right. And
that's true all the way up to and including Adam
de la Halle (or Machaut, if you consider him the
last of the trouvères). The work that Tom
Binkley and Studio did on this repertoire was
pretty much groundbreaking, and extremely
important.
part of this reason has to do wioth economics and
politics, but part of it is because they were just shit and not worth
preserving :-P .
I think this is completely wrong. Anyone who has examined a
significant amount of a cross section of the music of a past period
finds some surprisingly interesting stuff in the "discard" pile.
Sure, and the Graupner that Kim Patrick is
editing and the Muffat someone else is editing
are REALLY interesting. And they should be,
considering that Graupner was better thought of
than was J.S. Bach! On the other hand, back in
the '70s someone promoted a Romantic Festival in
Indianapolis on the theory that there was gold
among the unknown romantic music, and it turned
out that there WERE good reasons why they were
unknown!
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
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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