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Odd Registration Instructions


davidh

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From a recent publication which would probably prefer not to be named, "The pedals should start with the same or a similar timbre to the grate".

 

Another (one would normally presume with that sort of blooper - the one I am talking about is normally spot on) journal a while ago had a free insert of a piece of organ music by an up and coming young composer......who obviously knew nothing about the organ as the Pedal notes went way beyond the range of any pedal board that I've ever encpuntered!

 

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From a recent publication which would probably prefer not to be named, "The pedals should start with the same or a similar timbre to the grate".

 

Well I think it would do them good to be named here for their idiocy. Editors know they should check that everything is correct.

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Another (one would normally presume with that sort of blooper - the one I am talking about is normally spot on) journal a while ago had a free insert of a piece of organ music by an up and coming young composer......who obviously knew nothing about the organ as the Pedal notes went way beyond the range of any pedal board that I've ever encpuntered!

Schoenberg's Variations on a Recitative needs a 62-note manual to get an upper C#. He chose to write at sounding rather than playing pitch, so from the end of bar 91 and a while beyond it is necessary to draw 4' and 2' stops only, and play an octave lower than written. Perhaps Schoenberg "obviously knew nothing about the organ", but he was hardly "an up and coming young composer" at the age of 67.

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After the mentions of Britten and Tippett on another thread, am I alone in finding their organ writing slightly, um, uninformed? In the Britten Missa Brevis I seem to recall a moment where ff is accompanied by the registration indication + 4'.

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Another (one would normally presume with that sort of blooper - the one I am talking about is normally spot on) journal a while ago had a free insert of a piece of organ music by an up and coming young composer......who obviously knew nothing about the organ as the Pedal notes went way beyond the range of any pedal board that I've ever encpuntered!

One, if not both, of César Cui's organ pieces also goes off the bottom end and Alkan's organ/pedal- piano music regularly does likewise. I seem to recall that the first of Saint-Saëns's 7 Improvisations goes off the top end (but is manageable on a 4' stop).

 

Although I can't quote any specific examples off the top of my head (other than that well-known instance by Bach), I am sure I have come across bottom Bs written by people who did play the organ and thus should have known better.

 

Well I think it would do them good to be named here for their idiocy. Editors know they should check that everything is correct.

I'm sure they do. Have you ever tried proof reading? It's very hard work to do for any length of time. The trouble is, as numerous tests have proved, that one tends to see what one expects to see rather than what's actually there. Even the big publishing houses which build different proof reading stages into their production schedules are not always perfect. A small set-up with limited staff trying to meet deadlines has little chance. However hard you try, there will always be things you miss. And that's always assuming they understand jargon like "Great Organ". I think one can allow one's self the odd smile though. :)

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One, if not both, of César Cui's organ pieces also goes off the bottom end and Alkan's organ/pedal- piano music regularly does likewise.

:)

 

I have recently looked at the Alkan pedal studies and tried some of them, adapted for the smaller range of our pedal boards. Given that he owned and played a Pleyel pedal piano, I assumed that the range of these was wider than we are used to. Having just done some Internet searching and surfing, though, I can't find any support for this.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Well I think it would do them good to be named here for their idiocy. Editors know they should check that everything is correct.

 

And then there was the review of an organ recital I read about six months ago that commented on the performance of the triplets in the Toccata from Widor V. That one passed by the editor, too. It somewhat undermines the credibility of the other comments made.

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Well I think it would do them good to be named here for their idiocy. Editors know they should check that everything is correct.

 

 

In an ideal world this is certainly so. Regrettably we do not live in an ideal world. Amongst the many possible explanations/excuses one might consider

 

 

1. Authors who deliver copy late and/ or with illegible manuscript amendments AND then go incommunicado switching off their phones and not responding to e-mail ! Journals are produced to a deadline and with a specified number of pages. If the day for sending the stuff to the printer has arrived, but the author has not been able to be contacted, the choice may be between going with the text as it stands or "pulling" the offending piece, the latter option being most unlikely to be available in the case of any substantial contribution because of the impossibility of finding replacement pages to fill the gap.

 

2. Over-reliance on the spell-checker when copy is prepared on a computer. This is a truly wonderful tool but it cannot identify correctly spelt, but wrongly used , words eg grate/great nor words that should have been included but were left out, "not" being a very frequently encountered example.

 

3. In many "learned journals" the author is supposed to be the expert on the subject, the function of the editor being to ensure the text is presented in "house style" in a reasonably grammatical form. Not a few authors would look askance at having their text "corrected" by an editor.

 

Editors should certainly scrutinise carefully material they intend to publish , and correct any errors they discover, but they are surely entitled to expect that before the material reaches them its author will have checked it with sufficient thoroughness that there are none for them to find !

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