On 6 Nov 2010 at 11:04, Raymond Horton wrote: > Can we say "This doesn't really mean anything about what Mahler > originally wrote"? Of course not, unless we think some editor is a > genius.
I'm sorry, but by the rules of factual reasoning and logic, we CAN say exactly that, and be entirely correct in doing so. The editions may or may not represent what Mahler intended, but the fact of their mere existence does not tell us one way or the other whether they do or not. Certainly they tell us about what the publisher thought was the best practice, and that's useful information about Mahler's contemporaries. I don't want to overprivilege composer intent, either, as that's a thorny thicket of its own and can often lead to unmusical results if followed too slavishly. But the issue under discussion was the preferred horns of specific composers. The evidence you cited speaks to common practice, but not to Mahler's personal preference as a matter of factual proof, since we don't know that there is any connection between the particular editions and Mahler himself (there may be -- we just don't know). Based on that evidence, all we can say is what may have been, not what was. Lots of very bad things have happened in terms of musical traditions based on failing to maintain the distinction between what may have been and what we know for a fact was (for instance, the 4 Italian symphonies attributed to Mozart, which are simply not by Mozart, and for which there is no reliable evidence whatsoever that they have any connection with Mozart). That's my only point here -- that the evidence can't actually be used to "prove" what you used it for absent any information about a connection to the composer. That doesn't mean it's not useful evidence, if used for the right purposes (i.e., to establish general practices of publishers, and, hence what musicians would have been accustomed to). -- 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
