[HN Gopher] Preserving Bach's Manuscripts
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Preserving Bach's Manuscripts
Author : tintinnabula
Score : 65 points
Date : 2023-06-30 04:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.bl.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.bl.uk)
| siraben wrote:
| The manuscript of Prelude and Fugue 1[0] is still readable almost
| 300 years later, goes to show how stable Western musical notation
| has been. Even the crossed out sections still sound fine when
| sight-read, but he obviously wasn't satisfied with them.
|
| [0] https://blogs.bl.uk/.a/6a00d8341c464853ef02b7519f7c1f200c-pi
| perihelions wrote:
| For anyone who's confused, it looks like the 5th line on the
| left page (measure 14) jumps to the 6th line on the right page
| -- the pair of matching "^" symbols. And that continues to the
| bottom, then jumps back to the top of that same (right) page.
| Also, it looks like he's freely split-
|
| -ting measures across lines: where he finds extra horizontal
| space in a line, he puts a fragment of a measure there, rather
| than waste that space. Was paper expensive?
| chubbnix wrote:
| The article mentioned how he intentionally crammed together
| everything to fit on a single unfolded page so they would not
| need to flip the page over. This article suggests the paper
| may have been free for Bach though, but I suppose that
| doesn't account for his time spent writing or rewriting his
| works. https://www.bach-
| cantatas.com/Articles/BachPaperSize.pdf
| siraben wrote:
| This was fascinating: And what about all
| the candles used to illuminate the parts? Not a single drop
| of tallow or candle wax or darkening due to the close
| proximity of a candle has been detected or reported
| regarding Bach's original parts. Touching the parts while
| carrying them or turning pages would tend to leave traces,
| but these are not in evidence. Eventually these copies of
| the original parts would be collected and deliberately
| destroyed by Bach so that they could not be used to
| reconstruct the cantata.
| henryrp wrote:
| Another aspect of all old performance materials is the
| utter absence of rehearsal letters ("A", "B", "C" etc.),
| measure numbers, little eye-glasses ("watch the first
| chair here"), bowings, fingerings and all the other
| things contemporary classical musicians need to put into
| their parts during rehearsal. It really makes you wonder
| what a rehearsal in the 18th century could possibly have
| been like.
|
| And yes, I'm pretty sure Bach saved as much paper as he
| could. The autograph score to the Christmas Oratorio uses
| spare staves all over the place. This is not a page-
| turning consideration. An aria may coexist side-by-side
| with a chorus for many pages at a time to evidently
| prevent those 2-3 staves at the bottom of the page from
| being wasted.
| kashunstva wrote:
| It's quite remarkable indeed how legible Bach's hand is.
| Compare that to Beethoven's horrific scrawl e.g.[1] Small
| wonder his correspondence is filled with fights with copyists
| and publishers over their accuracy.
|
| [1]:
| https://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/5/5f/IMSLP5128...
| perihelions wrote:
| That's also because he's just violently unconventional with
| chromaticism. There's places in late Beethoven where Urtext
| editors aren't sure what a specific note/accidental was
| intended to be: they show possibilities option A and option B
| (from two sources - one of which was a misprint), and _even
| having both_ , the editors are undecided which one was
| actually the mistake. And if you study the music very
| carefully and think for a long time, you won't be sure
| either.
| 71a54xd wrote:
| Everything should be digitized in case we can't control ethnic /
| religious violence. Riots in France are a great example of how
| societal collapse or cultural experiments can lead to a mass
| destruction of precious cultural heritage. Even more
| heartbreaking examples are how much of the history and treasures
| of the Middle East have been destroyed or desecrated by ISIS and
| other religious extremists.
|
| Technology can help us save these relics as sad as it is to see
| their physical form perish.
| brippalcharrid wrote:
| Following on from this, I imagine that being able to synthesise
| atom-level (or at least indistinguishable) copies of priceless
| works of art of great significance could also provide a path
| towards resolving diplomatic disputes, such as in the case of
| the Elgin Marbles.
| quacked wrote:
| I hear a good number of people in contemporary musical academic
| circles talk about how overly simplified western music is, given
| its 12 tones, mostly rigid adherence to predictable rhythmic
| structures, and reliance on transcription. But I think the
| opposite of them; the simplicity of the scales and the
| consistency of the notation is _marvelous_. We can convene
| directly with the long-dead people who were making this stuff up
| 400 years ago. It 's the encoding of information into a more
| durable storage medium than peer-to-peer.
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