Re: Style for Editorial Rests

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