CornoDiBassetto94
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Posts posted by CornoDiBassetto94
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Apologies if this is a very basic question, but what is the idea behind principal-scaled mutations being part of the plenum and wider-scaled mutations not blending with a principal chorus? I occasionally find it fun to experiment adding a nazard and tierce to 8', 4' and 2' principals, like a cornet with an 8' principal instead of a bourdon.
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I know a pianist who has a Bluetooth pedal controller for his iPad (similar to one of these http://www.airturn.com/bluetooth-pedals) that he uses to turn the pages.
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Once again: Jerold emphasises the subtle nature of the inequality. Nowhere does she mention pepping the music up. To think of notes inégales as an excuse to transform pieces into bouncy jigs is to misunderstand their purpose.
If you want a good laugh then, watch this video, where they've certainly pepped things up.
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Assimilation seems to be a very good term to use.
I think the Couperin example might be more of an example of the exception rather than the rule. Of course, with most of this debate (inequality vs. dotted, dotted vs assimilation, inequality vs assimilation), we have the problem of determining whether two similar things that are notated differently are supposed to be the same or actually different and on top of that, whether we are looking at the general case or the exception!
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Yes. I think I would incline towards the view that, in the case of BWV 661 and 661a, it is more likely that Bach simply changed his mind about the speed. If the speeds of both versions came to exactly the same thing, why bother to change the notation?
This is interesting. I never realized that the change in notation could be used to justify either side ("He changed it, so it must have made a difference," or "He wrote the same thing another way, so the two are equivalent.")
Again I agree, but the (possible) problem with this is that it assumes that we would have found baroque performances to our taste. I don't see why that should necessarily follow. It is possible that they might have been more to the taste of those who performed those older recordings. Those slower speeds must have seemed perfectly musical to the performers at the time. Have you seen Beverly Jerold's online article on Baroque tempo? It's worth a read. (I posted a thread on it with a link a few months ago.)
I recall with wry amusement how, thirty years ago, my late father-in-law was always complaining about the modern fad for fast speeds in Baroque music. Nowadays it is me making the same complaint!
I have just found that post and read the article. Very interesting stuff, although it all goes to show how few rules we should prescribe due to complexity of the issue. Now on changing ideas about speed--there was once a time when I thought Anthony Newman's tempi should be the standard!
In short, a cut-time signature in Bach might just be a signal to the knowledgable player that it’s serious polyphony he’s dealing with, no less.
Best
Friedrich
This is a very interesting view I had not heard before. Of course, "common time" (notated with a circle) also existed before in older polyphonic music, and in the "St. Anne" Fugue we have common time for 4/2.
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Thanks for starting the new thread, as well as the illuminating explanation and the link to the article. I seem to be able to get access to the article, so anybody who is having trouble with it should feel free to message me.
I suppose this wouldn't be notes inegales per se, but is there a term for slight adjustments to rhythms to get them to match, for example, if there are triplet eighths and then there are dotted eighths and sixteenths that clearly should be played as a triplet eighth and sixteenth? (Beverly Jerold does mention the difficulty of differentiating between the 2:1 notes inegale versus the 3:1 dotted notes and that many modern musicians have conflated the two, but she doesn't seem to have any clear conclusions in that section, besides saying that singers couldn't read music and were bad at rhythm!)
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As for the cut C time signature, frankly I don't know. An answer to that would need someone with extensive knowledge of the sources of the time. I can only observe that Bach's normal common time signature is C, but barred-C in alla breve works. The difference must be significant in some way, but, given that the Renaissance proportional system was long dead by Bach's time*, does the barred-C imply a faster speed or just a grander manner of playing? I expect some contemporary says something about this somewhere. The most authoritative source of the Canzona is in C, but the elaborately ornamented version is in barred-C. It is hardly conceivable that the latter was played faster.
Well, I think there is some evidence that the two are supposed to be proportional in certain cases. For example, look at p. 178 here where we have BWV 661a in common time with sixteenth notes versus the final version in cut time with eighth notes. However, there are plenty of other examples where Bach did not change the note duration but just the time signature (see a couple of pages above on p. 174, not to mention examples in countless of other works). I think that he, like any other human being, sometimes simply changed his mind and did not have the idea of a "fixed beat".
Regardless of whether or not cut time should keep the same "beat" as common time, however, I do think cut time means that one should be able to count each measure in two rather than in four, which provides some kind of a lower bound for the tempo. Some recordings of this work (especially older ones), feel a bit too slow to be in 2/2 rather than 4/4. (I think that the overture from the 4th keyboard Partita, BWV 828, which is also in cut time, suffers similarly, although tempi for that piece are often even slower.)
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I once learned that notes inegales for certain French music was mainly for slurred notes and/or descending seconds, but I now cannot find any good sources for his. Did anybody else learn this too? It seems that certain sources, on the other hand, claim that slurs mean the opposite, that the notes should be played evenly.
Along these lines, I wonder about the tradition and background of playing dotted rhythms where the short note is connected to the next long note on the strong beat versus the longer note connected to the following short note.
What do you think about the cut time signature of the E-flat prelude, by the way?
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Thanks for the information. I will try and find that book. Being fairly new to the organ (I have only been taking lessons since around October), I am trying to absorb as much as I can.
The organ to which I normally have access is the one in the Princeton University Chapel, which was apparently was built after Harrison joined Skinner (and later modified several times, including by Mander).The Solo organ, which I believe has many of the various original Skinner pipes, has many very beautiful stops, but it would definitely be difficult to build any kind of chorus using them alone.
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Wow, what an instrument, and I can't believe it only sold for £31. Does anybody know how the two keyboards worked (two sets of actions and hammers or something)? I also wonder if any of these ever made it to the U.S.
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This is where you post a reply, informing me that it was played by a blind one-armed twelve-year-old Portuguese girl, on the two-clavier neo-Classical electronic organ in the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Toenails, Rochester, NY, USA....
Hahaha as these mystery identifications often result...
I also considered this, but I think that the chorus reeds are better than Skinner's. HWIII was particularly disparaging of Skinner's Diapason chorus work - and his chorus reeds.
What did Willis have to say about Skinner's work?
Mutation scaling
in Nuts and bolts
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Thank you! That's very interesting and explains a lot.