Talk:O bone Jesu (Robert Parsons)

Simona,

I've thought about your change of 5vv to 6vv and changed it back, while attempting to clarify the situation with the note about the Bass gimell. I absolutely see your point - if 5 solo singers got together to perform this piece, they'd find themselves a man down - but it is still a "5-part" piece; i.e. it's contained in 5 partbooks. I think if we tried to reflect every division when specifying the overall number of voices, we'd get into difficulties - some of White's psalm-motets, while in 5 parts, have multiple gimells that would take the overall number of voices up to 8 or 10, enough to make any choir director's heart sink at the sight. And what about those not infrequent cases in earlier 16th-century polyphony where a voice-part divides only at a final chord - would we want to specify two voice-parts throughout? So many pieces from this period are distinguished by their number of voices that I think we perhaps need to retain the "traditional" designation. (I don't think there are in fact any gimells in White's 5-part Lamentations, but if there were, we'd be calling them the 6-part Lamentations, to the endless confusion of users looking for the "real", much less well-known, 6-part ones.) I think that categorising a piece such as O bone Jesu as AATTBB is right and necessary for users searching for specific voicings, but I'd still like somehow to retain a mention of the actual number of voice-parts. My initial attempt is far from perfect, so please feel free to have a better idea.--DaveF 16:28, 8 May 2010 (UTC)