Hi Gabriel,
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.
Of course I see the need that in an ensemble with the two features of
having singers who routinely use their "modern a" perfect pitch for
sight reading /and/ scarce on rehearsal time, having an edition in
sounding pitch is helpful.
Genuit puerpera Regemis 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
lotsof F-sharps and B-flats thrown into the mix. That makes it
especiallyhard for the new-to-early-music singer whose brain perceives
pitches absolutely.
Yes, that's an 8th mode piece ("g hypomixolydian"), and it's interesting
that the f♯ and b♭ are already in the 1594 Graz print of the work
http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB00020AAD00000000 - it
shows we're close to the year 1600 mark :-).
Of course, "in theory" I would advocate for the altered notes not to be
perceived as "difficult chromatic notes" but as the most common
alterations stylistically needed for the various standard reasons
(avoidance of the vertical diminished fifth over the lowest voice; the
/una nota supra la/ rule for upper neighbor notes exceeding a hexachord,
and the need for the /subsemitonium modi/ in cadences). But of course
you're right, in the end one should print whatever's most helpful for
the ensemble at hand.
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 📄)!
:-) This is admirable, of course. Thanks for this!
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.
There's one thing I still do not understand, though: If you are creating
a practical edition, why is it important to you to mark the rests as
editorial, when you're content to print the shortened note before the
rest without indication of their changed note value? I think any special
marking of the rest without a corresponding marking on the preceding
note is likely to be misunderstood, namely, that the editor simply added
a rest that was missing in the original edition.
(By the by, I did some work on creating a music function for creating
the above-staff 'editorial rhythm indications', but there are still some
problems I have to think about if one wants a convenient user interface.)
Lukas
