Bona Speranza

One of the books I inherited from my friend Bonnie
was a facsimile of Antony
Holborne's Pavans, Galliards, Almains, and other short Æirs both grave, and light, in five parts, for Viols, Violins, or other Musicall Winde Instruments
. I had put up transcriptions of a few of these pieces based on the versions at the Werner
Icking archive some time ago. We played a couple last week at
the Cantabile
Band and they were fun, and the right sort of thing for the
people who've been coming to play together.
So when I was thinking what to transcribe this week, I got out
the book and transcribed the first piece. (Of course, I tried to
get it to fall out of the MIDI file on the web first, but that was
going to be enough work to get F♯ instead of G♠and similar
spelling errors that I decided to do it from the facsimile.)
After I transcribed the facsimile, I looked at the score, and
mirabile dictu, all the parts were the same length.
However, listening to the MIDI file, there was a very
unlikely crunch near the beginning of the B section.
Left to my own devices, I would have just changed the D in the
tenor part, which was clashing with C's and E's in the other parts
to an E. But I had the web transcription to compare it to, and I
checked with a friend who has the standard modern edition, which
seems to have been the source for the web transcription. My
minimal change certainly sounded better than the straight
transcription from the facsimile, but still had some crunchy bits
immediately following the part I'd fixed.
It took quite a while to figure out what they'd done, but the
answer turns out to be that they moved the D which was clearly an
error three half notes later. Their version sounded better than
mine, so I used that one.
Unfortunately, the next part of the story is that the people
who dropped in to the Cantabile Band last night were a completely
different set of people from the ones who'd enjoyed the Holborne
so much the week before, and there were only 4 of us even at
maximum, and 2 and 3 for a good part of the meeting.
So I still
haven't played this transcription with a group. If you get to it
before I do, and find any problems, please let
me know.