Re: Style for Editorial Rests

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