Re: Proper pronunciation of "Purcell"?

On Mar 9, 10:52 am, John Howell <John.How...@xxxxxx> wrote:
At 9:35 PM -0700 3/8/09, Jerry wrote:

This is less of a problem with 17th and 18th century sources than with
the earlier repertory you mentioned.

Granted, of course.  Often quite clear, although often obscured by
the multiple repetitions of a single line of poetry.

Things get more interesting as we go further back in history. Halle
and Keyser give examples (on p. 116) from a source from around
Shakespeare's time (Peter Levins's Manipulus Vocabulorum, 1570), where
words like "delectable", "acceptable", ""demonstrable", "detestable",
"dividable", "perdurable", and supportable" are all accented on the
*first* syllable.

Ah, but according to whose underlay?!!

Perhaps I don't understand you correctly, but Levins is not a book on
music. The Latin title means "A Handfull of Words", i.e., a vocabulary
handbook.

 The point of my earlier post
was that if we can't trust the primary sources--and we can't!--then
the secondary sources are just guess-work.  Sometimes educated
guess-work, if the transcriber is an experienced singer, but still
guess-work.

Sure. That was my point as well. If the singer, however so
experienced, doesn't understand the accent patterns in the context of
the period in which the text was set, he/she might as well be trying
to underlay French text using Hungarian rules of accent.


And of course it also calls into question how valid our concept of
"accented syllables" are in relation to their placement within the
bars.  True, by at least Purcell's time (although definitely NOT in
1570) there SEEMS to be a dependence on the bar lines to allocate
stress levels within each bar, and instrumentalists certainly appear
to have understood and followed that concept.  On the other hand,
there was a VERY LONG period in which no bar lines were used in vocal
music and each line was free to discover its own articulation and
stress pattern, and I would hesitate to assume that THAT tradition,
passed down from one generation of singers to the next, was not still
in play.  In other words, that the apparent conflict between word
stress and barline placement stress would not have been resolved in
favor of the words rather than the barlines.

I think you are overstating the case. Just because there were no
barlines doesn't mean to say there were no rules for accented notes.
In fact, it doesn't even mean there was never any sense of *measure*.
Reflect for a moment on a piece from a decade of two later than 1570,
Dowland's Frog Galliard, also set as "Now, oh now, I needs must part".
Are you seriously going to tell me that the accents on the words
"Now", "now", "needs" and "part" are not set to notes that are already
musically accented in the dance? Going back to the middle of the 16th
century, isn't it much the same case with Jannequin's "Il etait une
fillete" or Ludwig Senfl's setting of "Wann ich des Morgens früh
aufsteh"? I'll grant you that in motet style things can be trickier on
this front than in secular music, but there are still principles to go
by, such as setting the strong syllables to the longer notes. (And
let's not get into the rules of setting vers mesurés à l'antique!)

In my editions of renaissance music I often take the extra trouble to
remove the modern bar lines (not all that easy in notation programs
designed around placement between barlines!), although I do print
them in score format rather than individual parts, for purely
practical reasons.

And then there's Poulenc!!!  Or even Stravinsky.

Since Poulenc relied fairly heavily on Stravinsky for his rhythmic
ideas, I would say there is no "even" about it!

--
Jerry Kohl
"Légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákkal."

.

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