Wilktone wrote: Wed Sep 03, 2025 8:50 am
Maximilien, and anyone else, I have what might be an ignorant question.
in your sheet music you have this symbol, that looks sort of like a number 3 and sort of like an alto clef. The music is supposed to be in tenor clef there, I believe, so I don't think it's an alto clef.
Is this an indication that the feel of the meter should be in 3, rather than the quarter note pulse of 6 earlier?
Thanks,
Dave
Wilktone wrote: Wed Sep 03, 2025 9:09 pm
I guess I should have listened back to your recording before I asked. Or looked closely at the fulls score (in modern notation!).
So the 6/4 meter was a 3+3 feel earlier (in 2), and the "3" in the staff is an indication to feel the 6/4 in 2+2+2 (in 3).
I'm not used to that notation practice, is that common in music from the period you were composing in?
Hi Dave,
Not an ignorant question at all! It's just that I'm using late mensural notation rather than the modern time signature system. A few people might have been exposed to the mensural system in their music history classes, most are not. I make the particular proportion changes of that section explicit in the preface of the piece so that players don't need to know all the details of that system. In this case half note in “C" = dotted whole note in "3", and in the trombone part you have an intervening 6/4 for a while, so half=dotted half=dotted whole (in other words, 6/4 is triplet feel, and then going from 6/4 to 3 is a doubling of note values).
Wilktone wrote: Wed Sep 03, 2025 9:09 pm
Do you ever perform reading the historical notation? Sight read in it?
Yes, regularly, and we teach our students to. Funny story: in my very first lesson when I started studying early music, my teacher first flipped my world upside down by telling me my trombone was not in Bb at a=440 but in A at a=466, and that from now on, first position=A. Then she put a pile of music on my stand, all historical prints, and said "For today let's sight-read some of these!"... talk about being thrown right into the deep end!
For 17th century music, which this piece imitates, the notation is actually pretty much the same as today's in most respect even though it looks quite exotic. The "time signatures" work a bit differently but are fairly simple. The absence of barlines is something that throws people off at first, and also the frequent need to add accidentals on-the-fly, and therefore to know when and why. The biggest difficulties in reading original material from that period arise less from the notation system itself and more from the movable-type printing technology, which most notably doesn't support beams or too many ledger lines, but was much faster and cheaper than hand-engraving copper plates. This you can see in the pseudo-facsimile version of my piece, where all the notes are individual types, and un beamed, and clef changes are required for avoiding ledger lines. Manuscripts of that period are somewhat easier to read in that respect (assuming they're clean), but they also have their own idioms one needs to get used to.
For earlier music, then the difficulty is really in the mensural notation system itself as one needs to become fluent in its numerous and complex rules, that vary from mildly to wildly different from modern notation. There are three big challenges. You have the system of mensurations and proportions instead of time signatures, and oftentimes different parts are different ones simultaneously. Then in those mensurations with "perfection" (certain note values that divide into threes – not everything divides into twos by default like in modern notation!), which is most of them, you have somewhat complex rules of perfection that determine when a note is worth three and when it's worth two. And you have ligatures, where you get a series of notes all stuck together, and the rhythm is known from the shape or way the notes are attached, and the presence and orientation of any stem, with rules that are just not intuitive.
Fluently reading historical notations (and in all clefs) is an essential skill for early music specialists, for one because it allows us to read and unearth music that has never been transcribed in modern notation, and then also because it helps experience and understand the way early musicians read and conceived the music – for example not having barlines really changes your horizontal perception of the music as well as your feel of time and the way your eyes/brain parse rhythms, and also in ensemble music it forces you to listen to your colleagues differently and have more awareness of the counterpoint.
Most early music gigs use modern scores for convenience, certainty and efficiency of rehearsals. Oftentimes with smaller groups of highly specialised musicians we might use a mix, depending on repertoire. With my own chamber group Le Consort laurentien, we try to read from facsimile whenever it's practical, and it ends up being around 50/50. I might read more from facsimile while our continuo player reads more from score, some pieces we're all reading facsimile, others we've arranged, or the facsimile is not available, or really illegible and so we play from modern parts. Some more hardcore groups use exclusively historical notation. One such group I've performed on several occasions is Cappella Pratensis, a vocal ensemble that also has a mandate of research through performance, and with them not only we play from historical notation, but we actually sing and play everything (and sight-transpose, and sometimes improvise polyphony upon Gregorian chant) gathered around a single big choir music stand, reading from a full-size copy of an original giant manuscript choirbook, with very minimal or no annotations allowed in the book, just like choirs did in the Renaissance.
Here are a couple pictures and a video from a similar project of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis when I was finishing my studies there, where we performed from a newly-restored 500 year-old choirbook from the Milan cathedral archives.
The book:
Reading all from one stand:
Sight-singing from the choirbook for the first time:
