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Show for performance, the lack of full score made it susceptible to the fate of van Stappen’s missing voice. This next example can help us understand how partbooks sort of work and helps to highlight how we can go about recreating the missing voice. Say we have a line of text that we want separate people to take turns reading. In partbooks, instead of presenting the full text to everyone and marking each individual readers’ words with a distinguishing feature, we present them with only the words they read and some numbers to indicate how many words they should wait before they say their next word as shown below in Figure 1. Figure 1 In Figure 2 we have the separate parts and you can begin to see how this staggered reading would work. Figure 2 We start with the Soprano, reading their part. Then the alto waits two words before reading “is very”. The tenor waits four words before reading their text, then the bass and so forth and so on. But if one of the parts goes missing we no longer have the full text as we see in the missing tenor part of Figure 3. Figure 3 However, the grammar gives us some clues. We can guess that we need an adjective for the book, because of the paired adjective that follows. Likewise, we can infer we need “shelf” from the context and that “book” is missing because of the sentence structure. Similar clues can also be found in van Stappen’s piece by careful study of renaissance music theory and counterpoint. From studying the surviving parts and similar pieces by him and his contemporaries we can begin to reconstruct the missing voice, hypothetically completing the composition. In tackling the problem of reconstructing this voice, I first transcribed and rearranged the piece into score format. No sketches of van Stappen’s exist, so it isn’t certain what his exact compositional process was in terms of composing the parts out separately or all together in some sort of score-like format. I don’t have the memory of van Stappen or direct knowledge of his compositional intent, so the best way for me to see the relationships between the voices that he might have intended is by having the |
