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Author: eddyline
Date: 2009-04-15 20:52
I have a piece of music, for winds, published in Wien in 1952 by Universal Edition AG, which has strange markings on the parts. It is a quartet for Fl, Cl, Bn, and Hn by Apostle.
These strange markings are the angle brackets commonly used to indicate a group of measures which is meant to be prominent. They are, in this piece, composed of a vertical line 1/8 inch, joined to a horizontal line of the same length at the top, where the opening bracket has the vertical to the left and the closing one has the vertical to the right. If that were all, there would be no puzzle. But on each of the parts, some of these pairs are different in the opening bracket. In some the opening bracket has the capital letter H forming the vertical line, with the horizontal line going off the top toward the right like a little flag. And in some others, it is a capital N that forms the vertical line!
Do the H and the N suggest something to you, as initial letters of a German word? In all, each part has three types of bracket-pairs: some with H, some with N, and some with no letter, just a vertical line.
I expect that the musical sense of the work will suggest a meaning for these, but nothing satisfactory has occurred to me yet. Any ideas?
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-04-15 21:08
The "H" stands for "Hauptstimme," meaning "main voice."
The "N" stands for "Nebenstimme," which refers to a secondary voice--literally, an "on-the-side voice."
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