Anonymous: 2 Compositions from the "Roman de Fauvel" Manuscript for 3 Recorders

Anonymous: 2 Compositions from the "Roman de Fauvel" Manuscript for 3 Recorders

Overall, my experience was, well, OK. On the plus side, it was great to have these pieces at all in an accessible form, and they are both fun and challenging - not technically challenging, but challenging musically. Well worth playing. On the minus side, the notations for perfect mood and perfect time are exceedingly clumsy; triplet markings everywhere so that it becomes difficult to spot the odd imperfect time groups; longer notes an arithmetical issue, the page just looks a mess of unnecessary 3 symbols. There must be a better way. Second, there are lots of editorial accidentals, but no reason is given for them: are they to make it more attractive to modern audiences? Are they marked thus for scholarly reasons - are they musica ficta - and if so causa pulchritudinis or necessitatis? Or what? There are no editor's notes to explain the principles by which these editorial changes are made. Similarly - and more importantly - the editor does not mark plicae; they are simply under a square bracket like any other note in a neume. But whether a note is a plica or not is important to understanding the phrasing of the neumes; they aren't just scholarly pedantry. So yes, this edition is welcome, and it's just about OK, but it could have been so much better.