Hi Vaughan,
I grew up with transposed scores like this- for me, 5 flats is as
clean as any other key. I did spend my teenage years playing Böhm’s
flute études in all 24 keys, which maybe not every chorister has done.
I have seen younger singers who have been trained to transpose be put
off by the key signatures, especially if they specialise in early
music. In the tablet era this is less of a problem except for the
conductor knowing how to refer to particular notes.
If you are really put off by 5 flats, you might put it in 2 sharps and
specify to sing it at A=415Hz, as most absolute pitch singers these
days should have at least some experience with baroque pitch.
Not meaning to provoke a prolonged argument about what Gabriel rightly
described as a "long-standing debate" - in the "original written key vs.
transpose to sounding pitch" debate for Franco-Flemish music, both sides
have valid arguments, they only have differing priorities -, but I just
want to point out that, at least for me personally, the discomfort at
seeing a Lasso piece with ♭♭♭♭♭ does not stem from a general dislike of
multi-accidental key signatures. (These are great in Bruckner, or
Janáček, or Brian Wilson!) Instead, for me it is an expression of the
discomfort felt at seeing a piece of music, written in some specific
historical time, notated using pitches of which the original composer
had no notion. Mozart, even Bach could have written a piece in F♯ major
just as easily as in F major (although they usually chose not to, both
for reasons of tradition/convention and reasons of tuning), while for
Lasso, that notion would literally be inconceivable. The idea of
arbitrary transposition had not been born yet.
More concretely, for a Mixolydian piece like /Genuit puerpera regem/,
the choice is not whether to write in G-mixolydian, F-mixolydian,
D-mixolydian, A♭-mixolydian etc., but only whether to write in the
"original" mixolydian or the "transposed" mixolydian (C-Mixolydian, with
♭ key signature). (I'm lying a bit here, since I'm not really an expert
on the historical development of key signatures and the gradual
emergence of ideas such as double transposition = ♭♭ key signature with
F-Mixolydian.)
But, as I said, there are also good reasons to create a performing
edition in "A♭ mixolydian" if that, pitch definitions being what they
are these days, is what's used in a specific performance.
Lukas
