NOTATIO

Looks good to me. And Arnstein probably would have put the col canto vocal part in the other parts as a cue.

Two quarter rests seems clearer to me. I'm pretty sure Arnstein would have done it that way since he wanted exact correspondence of fermatas between all the parts including within cues.

I get your point about the Mozart example though. I guess this is not a generally understood and accepted device, but something that lives on a more personal individual plane? I think that the centered beam, like so many aspects of music notation, is capable of many different meanings. While genera...

Yes, the early version in the WF Bach Notebook shows a completely different and what seems to me to be a somewhat disorganized usage. The subject in the bass in measure 1 has inconsistent stem direction and the subject in measure 2 is set off with a centered beam that results both in inconsistent an...

Continuing regarding apparent inconsistency in the use of centered beams: Many centered beams seem to be a manifestation of a tendency to avoid changes of stem direction in the middle of a musical unit, be it a motive, sub-phrase or even a whole phrase. I have seen this tendency in the works of Bach...

When I first encountered this centered beam, I asked myself the same question. The issue is complicated. A simple answer might be that Bach (and other composers and engravers of his time) avoided centered beams when ledger lines were involved to avoid reading difficulties. This is clearer in the ori...

You are both very welcome!

OCTO., the analytical example for the Mozart was done in Dorico, which I am now using exclusively. The last Bach example was done in Finale many years ago. The second Bach example is from the NBA.

Ah, authenticity, what a difficult and deep topic! And a for that reason an excellent topic for discussion! If it were to be "authentic", then why not use the soprano clef directly? I don't believe in "authenticity" for its own sake. But I do believe in preserving what the compo...

I'm not sure, though, that a centered beam would make me play the music differently. Here is another example. Would the centered beam in Bach's manuscript of Invention 1 cause you to show the subject and counter-subject more: Invention 1 MS.png than if had been written without the centered beam as ...

Thanks, Neera. I would say that most centered beams were used because long stems took up too much space at a time when space was limited, as you implied, and I also think that they were considered ugly. (I might add that we still use centered beams for these two reasons today but only for much large...