I am performing Wood’s ‘Collegium Regale’ evening canticles shortly with the Erleigh Cantors, for the first time in a while. These pieces rather unusually have rehearsal letters in (I have a legally photocopied reprint of a 1920 ‘Year Book Press’ edition). Church music tends not to use them, because the pieces aren’t very long and everyone usually has identical copies with all bars written out, so you can refer to page or bar numbers in rehearsal. (An exception is the type of irritating French edition which omits the organ part and organ-only bars. I’m performing from one of those soon as well, but will leave it for another post).
Rehearsal letters in the Magnificat of Wood ‘Coll. Reg.’ run from A-K, with a curious exception: a ‘DD’ between D and E at the top of page 6 in my edition. DD’s when used as rehearsal letters generally occur in very long movements after you’ve run through the alphabet from A-Z and have to start again with AA. So what is this one doing here? I know Wood was Irish, but was the editor Welsh? Is it something to do with bra sizes? Or more boringly did they simply find that the gap between D and E was too large and they needed an intermediate rehearsal letter?