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Show THE SOUND AND THE FUSAE: MUSIC NOTATION AS A MEANS OF TIME TRAVEL Darlene Castro (Jane Hatter) Department of Music The Renaissance composer Crispinus van Stappen was born during a time in which things such as cloud storage and back-up files had yet to be invented; if something went missing it stayed that way. Unfortunately, this happened with one of the voices to his choral piece Exaudi nos filia and it has yet to be found. Without this voice his composition is incomplete and unperformable. This project of recreating the missing voice first came about at the suggestion of my research mentor Dr. Jane Hatter. I received a grant from the Office of Undergraduate Research at the University of Utah to study the transcription and digital typesetting of early music notation. Dr. Hatter knew Exaudi nos filia from her own research and thought might be interesting for me as a composer to try and recreate the missing voice. The more time I spent with the piece, the more I began to think about what would I have to take into consideration to get the most accurate result without creating a time machine, travelling back in time, and listening to the original. Performers of early music face a similar predicament when trying to play music from previous eras even when there is a complete score. They have historical treatises for reference, but they also rely on period instruments to get many of the nuances that would have been heard back then. For instance, consider this calligraphic text that dates from the 12th to 14th century. If we were to try and copy this, we can use a modern ballpoint pen to get the general shape and then painstakingly fill in the letters with ink. Or we can use a broad edge quill to almost effortlessly create a pretty close match. Handwriting tools and alphabet styles, musical instruments, and systems of music notation have all evolved over time. Some elements have persisted through these changes and many of these changes have made the tools better, but important nuances have been lost as well. These losses create enough of a difference to warrant the need for replicas of these historical tools to get closer results to the original. Just as we use period instruments to produce a more authentic performance, can we also compose with period notation to create a more authentic soundspace for van Stappen’s missing voice? If so, what does this tell us about the composition process and how tools such as notation can influence it and the composer? To tackle these questions and recreate the missing voice, we will need to focus on three things: the layout of renaissance choral music, the compromises made in the evolution of music notation in history, and the original system that the piece was written in—white mensural notation. 1. Layout One of the first things we have to understand is that music printing during the Renaissance looked a little different than music printed today. Choral music printing started in 1501 and by 1502 it was almost always printed in what is called partbook format. Unlike today’s printing, which consists of all the voices lined up on the same page, partbooks presented each voice in a different book. While this saved space and consolidated everything |
