18C polyphonic notation of chords

I have nearly completed engraving my edition of BWV 988, which will be available soon. I am adhering as much as one can nowadays to the form and style (and clefs!) of the first (and sole) edition by Schmid in 1741. In terms of engraving with programs such as Dorico, there are some things that cannot be done if seeking to get close to the look and feel of old editions or MSS, such as the beautiful expressive curving beams composers used, but there is a lot one can do. I try to keep the exact polyphonic voicing used.

I understand in general the fastidious separation of voices in 18C practice in general. But here is an example that a) I don’t understand and b) cannot be done in Dorico without excessive and fiddly manual engrave mode adjustments, and even then it is unsatisfactory.

Variation 29 contains a lot of triad chords, with each note carefully individually voiced with its own stem and flag. The question I have is, why is this done? What extra information is it meant to convey?

Sometimes Bach puts in every single rest in every voice, but here one is dropped. Whether this has any significance I have no idea.

It’s interesting that Henle has the same problem. Their engraving uses a more modern chordal style with two stemmed voices per chord, but they go to the trouble of having a note in the Appendix:

In the original edition each of the chords’ 16-th note (semiquaver) has a separate stem.

This is not a question about engraving. I have a topic on it in the Dorico forum. It’s a question about the musical meaning of this, what it is trying to convey?

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Le 07/01/2023 01:31, Andrew Bernard via The Jackrail écrit :

I have nearly completed engraving my edition of BWV 988, which will be available soon. I am adhering as much as one can nowadays to the form and style (and clefs!) of the first (and sole) edition by Schmid in 1741. In terms of engraving with programs such as Dorico, there are some things that cannot be done if seeking to get close to the look and feel of old editions or MSS, such as the beautiful expressive curving beams composers used, but there is a lot one can do. I try to keep the exact polyphonic voicing used.

I understand in general the fastidious separation of voices in 18C practice in general. But here is an example that a) I don’t understand and b) cannot be done in Dorico without excessive and fiddly manual engrave mode adjustments, and even then it is unsatisfactory.

Variation 29 contains a lot of triad chords, with each note carefully individually voiced with its own stem and flag. The question I have is, why is this done? What extra information is it meant to convey?

This is (or rather was) simply a notational convention: each note has
its stem. In some cases, it can make the voice leading clearer. But here
it conveys no extra information.

So why bother? I am still wondering.

Maybe Schmid was just a super stickler for convention. The interesting thing is there are hardly any other triad chords in the whole BWV 988 to compare it against.

Is it possible, if the notes of chords had been written on single stems, that the 18th-c. reader might have misinterpreted the score in some way? For example by over-holding some of the notes or spreading the chord? As written in the engraving the specific length of each note in each chord is very clearly indicated.

@mshields Now that I buy. Since Bach, rather than Schmid as engraver, was so ultra meticulous, and this is such a virtuoso and precise work, that explanation makes a good deal of sense to me.

Although this falls more into the engraving topic I raised on the Dorico forum, Schmid gets away with achieving an almost vertical stacking by having very clever curved stems on the bottom of thees notes, something only person with a graver on copper can do. Computer programs cannot so such tricks currently.

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It’s only when you look as closely at the Schmid engraving as Andrew, that you see how beautifully it is done. I am still wondering whether Bach meant anything by not writing out one rest in each of the chords; probably not, and it would be illegible with the third rests written in.

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Spearate note stems in what we would write with a single stem today are also a notational feature of the first editions of Frescobaldi’s first book of toccatas, and I have seen the same elsewhere – though, as usual, I am unable to give references off the top of my head today!

David

Le 09/01/2023 10:49, David Pickett via The Jackrail écrit :

Spearate note stems in what we would write with a single stem today are also a notational feature of the first editions of Frescobaldi’s first book of toccatas, and I have seen the same elsewhere – though, as usual, I am unable to give references off the top of my head today!

D’Anglebert’s Pièces de clavecin use separate stems (though they are not
always visible), as do Couperin’s four books, Muffat’s Componimenti
musicali, and many other publications. I believe this was the rule
rather than the exception. As an aside, Gustav Leonhardt used separate
stems in his Bach transcriptions, though the published version does
without them.

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Hello All, Obviously I know that individually voiced stems were used universally, thanks anwyay. That is not what I am questioning. What I am surprised about in the (pedantic?) rendering of simple triads with individual voices and stems and all the rests as well (though one technically left out). It seems over the top to me, and I can’t see, with my contemporary filters/mind (not contemporaneous!) what value it adds or how it makes the chords clearer or easier to read play. I notice some, but not all, tails are down. Again. interesting.

Henle ‘Urtext’ renders them as two voices, and Barenreiter ‘Urtext’ renders them as one. [Maybe their engraving software, like Dorico, can’t do it either. :slight_smile: ]

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Actually, Henle hand-engraved its editions until the end of the 20th
century:
https://www.henle.de/us/about-us/music-engraving/
But maybe they didn’t have the right punches.

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My preference is to make the engraving as close to the original as possible. One reason is that it places the performer as close to the composer as possible but also makes the player think on a different level. Usually, this is a question of beaming or notational idiosyncrasies, though if going down this rabbit hole, there is no reason to alter voice designation.

I don’t use Dorico since the learning curve is too great and all my editions are done successfully (if not quite beautifully) in Sibelius. I have been using it since the 90s and have (especially in the early days) learned to think out of the box.

I don’t know if you are a Mac or Windows user. I use a Mac and a standalone macro program (Keyboard Maestro) which records multiple keystrokes and repeats them. So, with a middle voice selected in Sibelius’s filter option, I can move all the require 0.41 spaces to the right. Surely Dorico allows the x-axis shift of notes?

I’ve come to be a little fascist about the separation of notes in a chord since publishing my François Couperin edition under my own label in what seems like a century ago (it was, in fact, in 2019). But I am increasingly purist: if we expect performers to be HIPP aware, then editors should play the same game. After all, it’s about connecting with the past!

JB

Hi @LyrebirdMusic I have a topic about this on the Dorico forum, so I won’t go into great detail here. Of course Dorico can do very fine note spacing and stem length adjustment. I also strive, exactly as you precisely, to establish as much as possible of the original engraving in my editions (especially original clefs which drives everybody nuts!) and original voicing and stemming and so on.

The problem with Dorico is that even with the tightest gluing together of the three voices in this variation, the diagonalisation compared to the original Schmid engraving is too much, unacceptable. I think I mentioned above that Schmid gets away with it with his punches by using snazzy curved stems on the bottom note (perhaps hand cut in this special case), so he can squinch the notes almost vertical.

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