I have recently started to learn ‘L’invito’ by Rossini and got hold of Ricordi’s edition of it. I was rather surprised to discover an obvious misprint: a 3/4 bar with only two beats in the voice part. It was easy to see what had happened; the note values of the first two beats had been halved.
There were two curious things about this:
– the same bar occurs twice elsewhere, both times correctly printed
– there are no publication or reprinting dates in my copy, but this must have gone through several reprints at least. However, the error has never been corrected.
The English Gradual is riddled with errors, surprisingly so when the music is the same for each week of the liturgical year or festival. I came across two in last Sunday’s Offertory alone.
Errors are sometimes included deliberately as a crude copy protection mechanism.
Cartographers also do this to protect their maps, mentioned in passing in this article http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1771598,00.html and Nicholas Crane’s TV series on maps, in particular the episode on the London A to Z. I beleive there was a court case a few years back as well, where the fact that the original map maker had deliberately marked a feature on the wrong side of a road/river, then a nother map ccame out with exactly the same error – which would have been pretty unlikely if the second company had gone out and surveyed from scratch.
Simialrly in music, stick an obvious error in, if another edition comes out with the same error, you’ve probably ripped off, they would be pretty unlikely to have made that error if they’d gone back to original sources.
David
I think that’s quite a plausible explanation for the Rossini, less so for the English Gradual, because there are so many errors and the production standards generally seem rather lower so it’s more likely the errors are genuine errors. But if you sing at a church which uses this, you very quickly learn the five psalm tones involved and stop bothering to read the notes.
By the way I apologise if you tried to post a comment earlier and couldn’t – I tweaked the code a bit to foil a spammer (talking about psalm tones made me accidentally write ‘psammer’!) and inadvertently broke it for a time.