I strongly doubt that Prokofiev was working with transposed scores and editors were changing them, considering his most famous contemporaries (notably Stravinsky and Shosty) used transposed scores. On that evidence alone I infer that Proko wanted his scores in concert pitch.
My Dover score for Peter and the Wolf says it is A clarinet on the Instrumentation page, although it is buried in a blob of text. Be that as it may, I always mention the transposition where any score does, with the additional note: sounding as written. I also list any doublings on the instrumentation page. I think that is the clearest practice. Prokofiev had a lot of idiosyncrasies. He always wrote English horn parts on an alto clef, while his F horn parts divide between treble and bass clef. (One of my comp teachers suggested writing the horn parts on mezzo-soprano clef, since that has the same lines and spaces as F transposition, but my skills--I must admit--do not extend to mezzo-soprano clef, so it always confused me even though I play horn! It also seemed a bit precious.) Prokofiev's copyists apparently didn't know what to make of the concert pitch horn parts. Often all the clef changes that are sensible in C but make no sense in F are nevertheless slavishly copied in. There is also occasional inconsistency about which horn bass clef. I remember one of movements of Romeo and Juliet Suite uses a different bass clef than the others (in the transposed horn parts). Parts made from later C scores do not have these issues, but it is interesting to see the challenges the nascent practice introduced. For figuring out which horn bass clef, C scores are a godsend. For example, there is one passage in the Rochberg Trio for piano, clarinet, and horn where the part is low enough that visually it could be either. Thankfully the score is concert pitch, so it removed any doubt about which octave he wanted. Nevertheless, at least one very famous artist has recorded the passage in the wrong octave. (To be fair, it may not be the artist's fault: Rochberg could easily have changed it or clarified it after it was recorded.) On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 10:13 PM, SN jef chippewa < [email protected]> wrote: > > john, you can't extend your experiences with badly done concert pitch > scores to the entire realm of concert pitch scores. and you can't > blame proko for modern editions of his scores. i (don't know for > sure but) would assume the score he submitted and the version he > proofed for publication were transposed. > > >I still get thrown by soprano, mezzo-soprano, and baritone clefs, > >and have to decode tenor clef, all of which Nadia Boulanger > >was still teaching through the mid-20th century. > > well, a lot has happened since the nadia era. make yourself a strong > batch of coffee and look some of it up. > > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
