2012/5/14 Don Simons <[email protected]>: > That's more or less the effect of the tenor clef (which is a C clef) in the > autograph facsimile of the lute suite BWV 995. But hardly any modern > keyboard players, including your truly, are comfortable reading from tenor > clef, or any other C clef except maybe alto clef. > In 1977 I regularly attended chamber music bashes, playing the treble recorder. They lasted all of a Sunday. Our host would select something, put the parts out on a stand, and if you strayed into the music room at that moment, he'd point you to a stand. Only very rarely was the part you got appropriate for your own instrument. I had to sight-read at the proper tempo (or nearly so) parts written for viola, bassoon, etc, without of course having the benefit of seeing what notes anybody else would be playing.
In several clefs, and with some of the parts (clarinet especially) also requiring transposition. First time round I was grateful to pick up on a unisono bit near the end so I finished together with the others. The rest of that day I was not often so lucky. But you know, after a few more Sundays, I learnt to read music in what I now know to be PMX-style: this note is two up, that one is three down, and I developed a sense of eighteenth-century idiom (all minor baroque and rococo composers are immensely predictable) and I started to enjoy what we were doing, and getting, oh maybe 90% of the notes right. ------------------------------- [email protected] mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
