Making a critical edition of a Viennese bass work. A case example:  J. M. Sperger's Sextet Cassation in D Major

Jussif Barakat

About this exposition

The original repertoire for the Viennese bass that has been published in the past 30 years has been often transcribed for the modern double bass tuned in fourths. This makes the idiomatic material of the Viennese bass quite challenging as it is unsuited to this instrument. Pioneers such as Klaus Trumpf have published many pieces of Viennese bass music but in all of the transcriptions they have altered the original key signatures, changed octaves and slightly changed the melodies, added a piano accompaniment instead of viola (Sperger's duet), and transposed the piece a tone higher for solo tuning modern double bass. In this respect, the published material lags very far behind recently published music for historical instruments. Gradually one can now find some of the original manuscripts of this repertoire online. Nonetheless, when performing these pieces with other players on historical instruments it is useful to have a modern transcription which is more practical to read, with bars numbers written in and where the necessary corrections have already been made. The Cassation in D that I chose to focus on is a challenging piece for all the members of the sextet including the bassist, at the same time it has an optimistic character with many idiomatic themes for the double bass. My goal for this research was to simply to present the original material for the Historically Informed Performer with the added conveniences for performance, and with some historical contextualization of the piece, as well as an analysis.

type	research exposition
date	10/12/2017
published	24/09/2019
last modified	24/09/2019
status	limited publication
license	All rights reserved
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/414144/575774
published in	KC Research Portal
portal issue	3. Internal publication

name	Viennese tuning
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name	Sperger
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name	Figure 11
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name	Figure 12
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name	figure 28
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name	figure 29
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name	1st movement The Allegro Moderato
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name	The Minuetto Grazioso
copyright	h
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name	The Minuetto 4th movement
copyright	ash
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name	First movement Viennese bass solo 1
copyright	cv
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name	First movement Viennese bass solo 2
copyright	bfs
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name	Fourth movement the romance solo 1
copyright	fc
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name	Fourth movement the romance solo 2
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name	Figure 1
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name	Figure 2
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name	Figure 3
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name	Figure 4
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name	Figure 7
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name	Figure 8
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name	Figure 9
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name	Figure 10
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name	Jussif Barakat-Making a critical edition of a Viennese bass piece
copyright	Jussif Barakat
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usages	pdf

name	Sperger's Cassation in D major-Parts (1783)
copyright	Sperger
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name	Sperger's Cassation in D major-Score (12-May-1783)
copyright	Sperger
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name	Sextet, the Cassation in D major edition - Score and parts
copyright	Jussif Barakat
license	All rights reserved
usages	pdf

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Making a critical edition of a Viennese bass work. A case example: J. M. Sperger's Sextet Cassation in D Major (2019)

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