News & Views Sunday, April 28, 2024

Who's in charge?! Monday, October 26, 2009

Stanton’s gets hundreds, if not thousands of new pieces of music each year.  We make every attempt to look through them all to determine whether or not we want to stock them in any kind of quantity. Every now and then a publisher will do something that makes us wonder, “What were they thinking?”

One company who had published a “pocket sized” drum rudiment dictionary (about 3 inches wide) came out with a new edition they proudly touted as “now available with a CD.”  The CD, of course, sticks out of the book by at least an inch, just begging to be snapped off.  Good packaging, folks!

Scholarly prose in the preface of some pieces lends an air of legitimacy, but sometimes you have to wonder at some of the logic.  One reads, “The four sonatas Handel wrote for the treble (today’s alto) recorder and figured bass are eminently suitable for the oboe.”  That sounds perfectly legitimate, but the next few lines describe how they are “eminently suitable.”  The paragraph continues, “…being in the wrong range for the oboe (consistently too high for practical purposes and for comfort), they have to be transposed a fourth lower.  The problem of phrases too long to be comfortable for the oboist was solved by transferring small segments of the solo line into the accompaniment.”  So basically, somebody had to totally rewrite the pieces to make them “eminently suitable.”  Thankfully, they do work well for oboe after all that work and have become staples of oboe literature, but a little rewriting of the preface may be in order for accuracy’s sake!