Re: Nostalgia

[David Raleigh Arnold]

Juergen Reuter wrote:


> Pragmatically seen, in most of the piano music (especially after the
> period of baroque), I would say, you are definitely right, because the
> pianist usually reads all "voices" simultaneously.


More or less simultaneously.  If conducting from a piano score, it is 
advantageous to the conductor if he is seeing the same accidentals that 
the players are seeing.  The more parts, the more complex the music, and 
the more complex the music, the more likely a problem.  Any time that 
you are writing or reading musltiple parts you are in a conductor's 
shoes.  That is the rationale that persuaded me.  Piano scores for 
orchestral works used to be very common.  Often a full score was not 
published at all, just the parts and piano score.  The Sammartini 
example is the only one I have seem lately, but I don't know whether 
that is the original published version or a later arrangement. 
Unfortunately, it is in C.

> In choir music, it is very bad but common practice to put e.g. the tenor
> and bass voice into a single staff (actually, this is only a benefit for
> the conductor, if he/she, as a pianist, wants to play all of the voices).
> As a tenor singer, the bass voice is basically not more or less relevant
> for me than e.g. the soprano voice.  Therefore, I am not interested in the
> bass's accidentals -- at least not more than in the soprano's accidentals.
> Therefore, while reading my voice, I do not want to simultaneously read
> the bass's accidentals, so that in your above example, I personally would
> prefer not to see a natural sign.


But the natural would not cause a mistake.  The lack of a second sharp 
might.

> I can not remember any example where I would have had to regard the bass's
> accidentals to get my own voice right; but I neither can recall any
> example in choir music such as the one above given by you; maybe I should
> have a more detailed look at this.


Excellent.  In the last brawl many other people were looking at old 
music but if they were considering this issue they never mentioned it.


> As bottom line, I think we really want to have both possibilities of
> accidentals handling (something like a boolean property for turning on/off
> some kind of barrier that prevents accidentals from floating into
> neighbouring voices of the same staff).


I think the goal should be that you should be able to read any staff as 
if it were one part, but also be able to erase each part in turn without 
causing ambiguity at any stage.  Isn't that as good as it gets?  :-)

Riemenschneider is not a good example because it's Baroque and there are 
indeed a lot of unnecessary accidentals by today's standards in the 
Chorales, but see measure 7 of Chorale 122 anyway.

------------------------------------------------------------
Information is not knowledge.           Belief is not truth.
Indoctrination is not teaching.   Tradition is not evidence.
         David Raleigh Arnold   address@hidden