On 21 Jan 2009 at 12:05, John Howell wrote: > At 9:19 AM -0500 1/21/09, David W. Fenton wrote: > >Mozart didn't "call for" trombones -- there's no indication of that > >in the scores of any of his liturgical music. > > I may have seen the indications in modern scores.
No doubt -- the B&H Gesamtausgabe certainly indicated the trombone doubling, but there's nothing at all in any Mozart autograph I've ever seen that calls for trombone doubling in the liturgical music (including the music). > But in a graduate seminar I was assigned some ms. > pages to analyze that happened to include a piece > by Schütz (possibly from the "Psalmen Davids" ...which, of course, has zilch to do with Mozart's practice... > composed under the influence of Venetian > practice), in which the score had very clearly > hand-copied indications of "con tromboni" and > "senza tromboni." One could argue that those > indication were entered by a choir director > rather than the composer, but the result is the > same in either case. (There was also a wonderful > place where I discovered that a mensuration > change overlapped in various parts, making the > proportion absolutely clear!) Wow -- that's pretty unusual. Was it one of the stereotypical proportions, or something interesting? I've always been suspicious of slavish devotion to strict proportion, myself, as it often results in problems (particularly in certain vocal pieces). My bet is that they had rules what they meant, along with oral traditions of interpretation where they weren't actually slaves to the exact proportion. I think is especially true in the 17th century, because by that time Baroque affect was beginning to control performance as much as tactus and proportion. But I digress... [] > Yes, the point I was trying to make. Now with > all that given, one has to wonder whether > Beethoven harbored some kind of secret liturgical > idea regarding the Finale of the 5th. Or if he was really doing something new. I don't know what kinds of traditions there were in military establishments, if there were something like brass sections or not. Perhaps there was a brass sound that existed outside the genre that were familiar that he was drawing on (the same way that certain types of D major and C major pieces of all kinds in the late 18th century draw on military music for some of their style and instrumentation, e.g., celebratory music with trumpets and drums). -- 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
