Talk:Missa Sine Nomine (Schidlowsky)

Latin vs. Spanish

I found the work in Spanish in the composer's list of works. Shouldn't he be the authority? -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:16, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

The entry on the composer's website is not in Spanish, but in Latin (and misspelled). (Native Spanish speaker with an intermediate knowledge of Classical Latin here!) — CurryTime7-24 (talk) 21:49, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Why would you think so? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:55, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Why would I think what? — CurryTime7-24 (talk) 22:00, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Why would you think he wanted to use the Latin Missa and not the Spanish Misa? Or write it as he wanted? To say a creator misspelled his creation seems a bit - don't have the right word ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:22, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Ah, I see what you mean. A Google search turns up the misspelled Latin name, along with the (correctly spelled) Spanish version. Very likely Schidlowsky did spell it this way. Whether this was intentional or not is another story. To me, an accidental misspelling of "missa" seems more plausible than an intentional misspelling for the sake of a linguistic mash-up, if only because the latter is clumsy and easy to miss for a Spanish speaker.

For example, suppose that Alexander von Zemlinsky had wanted to render the title of his Lyrische Symphonie in a mix of English and German. It would make more sense to render "lyrische" into English given the near-identical similarity of "symphonie" to its English equivalent. Even so, the effect would still look weird and plausibly erroneous given that "lyrische" is also similar enough to "lyric." That's the issue here with this Schidlowsky title and why, at least to me, its spelling was probably just a mistake. However, if you would like to restore the original spelling, I won't dispute that.

Just to be clear, I had no idea the possible misspelling of the name originated from the composer. I thought you had accidentally misspelled it. ;) — CurryTime7-24 (talk) 23:26, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

And here I thought that article and the first line of this thread made clear that it was the composer who wrote "Misa Sine Nomine", possibly as a mix of the Spanish "Misa" and the standing Latin phrase "sine nomine". - Not that it matters much here: "Lyrische Symphonie" is perfect German, - only in 1996 a orthography reform made it Sinfonie. Beethoven might have been horrified. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:21, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Names I see in sources for this article:

• Composer's website, Emmaus, recording: Misa Sine Nomine
• NMZ, thesis, Isreali website, YouTube: Misa sine nomine

I'd conclude that we can debate about uc and lc, but not about "Misa". Please note that Emmaus and the composer have a "Missa in nomine Bach" and the composer also a "Missa Dona nobis pacem".

Next questions:

• Is the In Memoriam ... to be treated as a subtitle?
• I found a thesis in Spanish which I added for "graphic notation" in general, - can you find more details from it?
• Can you find more details about the projections to accompany the music, or is the graphic notation to be shown, or a mix? The NMZ aarticle mentions a photo of people being arrested but that alone is a bit weak to build a sentence on. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:27, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

The spelling issue is odd, but wouldn't be unprecedented. Wrong notes, missing clefs, and the like are fairly common typos in manuscript scores. Misspellings occur too. One that comes to mind is an early and ultimately aborted symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich that preceded his Op. 10 by about four years; on the title page he misspells the German word for symphony as "sympfonie." Another better known example comes from Modest Mussorgsky, whose manuscript score and first published edition of Pictures at an Exhibition misspells one of its movements as "Con [sic] mortuis in lingua mortua." It is highly unlikely that a mix of Italian (or Spanish?) with Latin was intentional there; subsequent editions have since amended this error.

Returning to Schidlowsky, the correctly spelled Missa Dona nobis pacem was composed a decade later from the subject of this article, which again suggests to me that the misspelling of his Jara memorial was accidental and that he ensured it was not repeated. As a native Spanish speaker and proficient wielder of Latin, what you theorize looks very unlikely. If Schidlowsky did intend a melding of both languages (why? is there any evidence attesting to this?), then why would he pick a word that is virtually identical in both, but not the other two which are progressively dissimilar from each other to make his point (sine = sin, another toughie since this also sounds like "cine," meaning "film," "cinema," "movie," and "movie theatre"; nomine = nombre)? Again, imagine if Zemlinsky mixed English and German and called his work "Lyric Symphonie" or "Lyrische Symphony". Without any prior knowledge of this work, wouldn't you at least think on first sight that this naming looks bizarre and is likely an error? —CurryTime7-24 (talk) 17:11, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

FYI, the Israel Music Institute's web page to purchase the score has the correct Latin spelling of "missa." [1] — CurryTime7-24 (talk) 17:13, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

As for the full title of the work, it's Misa [sic?] Sine Nomine (In Memoriam Victor Jara) according to Schidlowsky's website, similar to Stravinsky's Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam. —CurryTime7-24 (talk) 17:21, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

I think that, regardless of which spelling of the title we use, we ought to be consistent in applying a single version when talking about the work – right now the title uses Latin, while the lead uses Spanish. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 12:46, 22 December 2022 (UTC)