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Friday, January 18, 2008

Style Points

I've seen a couple of usages become common in the last few years that strike me as just plain wrong. Thank goodness I have a nice public place to rant about this.
  • Orchestrations where I would have expected to see orchestration. I promise you, I never saw "orchestrations," plural, when I was in school. "Orchestration" was considered to refer to every particular point of instrumentation.
  • The "Great" Symphony, by Schubert. Come hear Schubert's "Great" Symphony! This particular horror is turning up on orchestra web sites, for crying out loud. The correct term is "Great" C Major Symphony, to distinguish it from the "Little" C Major Symphony. Or Symphony No. 9 in C Major (the "Great"). Don't use this as if it were "From the New World" or "Rhenish." Schubert's "Great" symphony: wrong, wrong, wrong.

2 comments:

  1. "Orchestrations" is a Broadway term. It probably leaked over.

    I haven't seen the Schubert "Great" Symphony usage. When I'm being really snotty I refer to it as the Gmuden-Gastein Symphony, or D. 944. Nyah, nyah, nyah!

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  2. Ooooh, thank you. I've seen that "Great" business at SFS and at KDFC, possibly other places.

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