Thank you, Lukas, for sharing your thoughts! On Tue, 23 Jun 2026, Lukas-Fabian Moser wrote:
> > - The transposition: Maybe it's a bit of voodoo, but I'm convinced > that the way music looks in print influences how we "feel" it / think about > it / perform it. The lack of key signatures (except for one ♭ in the > 'transposed system') is essential for the way pitches and their relations > are construed up to the 16th century and beyond. Especially for a very > small shift like a semitone, I feel that you get a considerable loss in > authenticity of look-and-feel for a comparatively small gain. When > performing music of that time, I think one has to get used to the fact that > the correspondence between written pitch and the pitch a present-day singer > with perfect pitch (or experienced vocal chords) might expect is modified. > To me, seeing Lasso with ♭♭♭♭♭ key signature looks as 'wrong' as it would > look in halved or quartered note values. > > Ah yes, the long-standing debate between Team “Absolute Key” and Team “Clean Key Signature”! Transposing this piece up a semitone was not my personal decision but a request that I needed to honour. The reason that someone else made the request to me is, in brief, that several singers in this choir have absolute pitch. As you point out, in early music, ensembles frequently transpose pieces by sight. I’ve observed that when singers with absolute pitch are new to performing early music, there is a learning curve. For musicians who have absolute pitch and (like most of us) grew up on music from the 19th century onward, it can take a year or more of doing early music regularly to develop pitch-level flexibility. Genuit puerpera Regem is a particularly tricky Lassus piece to transpose by sight because of its modality. I’ll write about the original key for the purposes of this paragraph. Here’s a PDF of the score <https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/images/c/c4/Lassus_Genuit_puerpera_regem.pdf> in the original tonality. Lassus wrote in G Mixolydian, but there are lots of F-sharps and B-flats thrown into the mix. That makes it especially hard for the new-to-early-music singer whose brain perceives pitches absolutely. Of note, this ensemble is a professional choir that goes through a huge amount of music each week, so time to learn and rehearse music is very much at a premium. All the above is not necessarily to say that “five flats is clearly and objectively the right decision for this choir.” Rather, it is just an attempt to explain the reasoning behind the (certainly debatable) transposition that I ran in Frescobaldi when I started my work on this edition! 🙂 would cause me, if I were to sing or direct this piece, try and look for a > different edition, no matter how beautiful and thorough it is: If ever I publish this edition on CPDL, I will post my engraving file as well as the PDF, so you as choirmaster can easily transpose my work back to Lasso’s original key (and change the paper size from Letter to A4 📄)! > - The editorial rests: The main problem I see with the [bracketed > rest] is that the brackets are an established means of indicating that the > editor added something here that should probably or certainly be there, but > was missing from the original source. I could understand your slightly > modified meaning of 'the editor suggests that you should read a rest here', > but what the brackets fail to indicate is that you've also changed the > duration of the preceding note. > > I was not aware of this established convention. I am glad that I started this thread and that you and others have provided this helpful input to me! > > > Here's an idea for indicating the shortened note without sacrificing the > accuracy of the edition: What about something like the following? > > It would be a bit of work to set this up robustly and conveniently in > LilyPond, so I'd like to ask first ... > This is a very interesting possibility; thank you. To be honest, if I were to use this kind of approach (i.e., print both the original duration and the duration that the choirmaster wants the singer to sing), I think I would probably want to swap the two. In other words, I’d put the e2. r4 in the main staff and the e1 as the annotation above the staff, perhaps in parentheses. That way, the singer who “just wants to identify quickly and execute what Maestro wants” can just focus on the musical content that is printed within the staff itself. I will think more about this. Thank you again!
