[Letter from David Fuller]Author(s): David FullerSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), p. 366Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831356 .

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- COMMUNICATIONS -

To the Editor of the JOURNAL

AN AMIABLE EXCHANGE of letters be- tween myself and the author has established the following concerning some tremoletti by J. A. Herbst, stat- ed in my review of Frederick Neu- mann's Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music (this JOURNAL, Summer [i98o]) to have been incor- rectly transcribed. The example, which appears twice, as 28.4.c and 37.3, follows the 1658 edition of Herbst. This is listed along with the first edition of 1642 in the bibliogra- phy. Both editions are mentioned in the text on both occasions but only 37.3 is dated in the caption to the example, and the date given is 1642. I therefore checked a copy of that edition in the Sibley Library, Roch- ester, and discovered that the first and third of the tremoletti were in- verted, whereas all four dip below the main note in Professor Neu- mann's examples. Very likely the second version constitutes a correc- tion by Herbst and was to be pre- ferred, so that the error is really one of labelling rather than transcription.

DAVID FULLER State University of New York at

Buffalo

To the Editor of the JOURNAL

I CANNOT LET Ellen T. Harris's arti- cle, "The Italian in Handel" (this JOURNAL, Fall [i980]) pass by with- out making a number of critical ob-

servations. While she includes several timely comments, her main contention is vitiated by the use of selective evidence to prove a point and her premises are not founded on fact. The difficulties are these:

i) The title of her article should read: "Handel and Alessandro Scar- latti-Comparison of Three Selected Cantatas," and not what it does, which implies a much more far- reaching discussion. To try to prove that Handel was not influenced by the elder Scarlatti because their can- tatas on the same texts are different musically is like opening a door a small crack and presuming the wind will push it back the whole way without further effort. It really does not prove anything. It merely shows that the two composers approached the texts with different musical aims in mind, and it hardly touches the question of what "The Italian in Handel" was. One would have to compare a great deal more of their music in order to upset past state- ments by Messrs. Herbage, Larsen, Lang, Dean, and Dent about Scar- latti's influence on Handel. Also what about other Italian composers of the time-Gasparini, Lotti, Cal- dara, the two Pollarolis, and a host of others? Handel certainly must have heard their music when he went to Naples and Venice as well as Rome, and he could not help being touched by it in his formative years as pri- marily a composer of Italian texts.

2) Professor Harris makes much of Handel's not borrowing from Scarlatti to prove their lack of con-

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