J. S. Bach's original work is written solely for low strings (2 viola da braccio, 2 viola da gambe, violoncello and violone). We've attempted to reflect that by transcribing for "low" recorders, i.e. 2 trebles, 2 tenors and bass plus a basso continuo instrument (e.g. violoncello, bassoon or C-bass recorder)
Stringed instruments have considerably greater range than recorders. Therefore we didn't just copy the original string parts to the recorders but in stead made use of either transposing to another octave or splitting a musical phrase between sev- eral recorders depending on what seemed most musically reasonable to do. For example in case of a phrase starting at a high pitch and then later moving much lower we would chose to start a phrase (or a pair of phrases) in the higher instruments (trebles) and let the lower instruments (most often tenors) take over. By doing so we - as a secondary effect - have achieved a spreading of the "interesting" musical stuff more evenly between the instruments than in the original work having the main emphasis on the upper (viola da braccio) parts. The only unchanged part in our arrangement is the basso continuo part.
The pseudo pedal point 16th note phrases of the viola parts (bar 16-47 and 58-59) are difficult to play on recorders. The editors have therefore chosen to split the melodic lines and the pedal notes of these phrases such that the treble recorders play the melodic lines as 8th notes while the tenor recorders play the pedal notes as repeated 16th notes. A few places (bar 29 and 94) small size note heads indicate alternate notes for the tenor recorders.
In order to typeset the scores from the source files you'll need two program packages:
A MUP binary compiled for your operating system must be installed according to the instructions found at the MUP web site while Qs (Quikscript) is platform independant and ready for use on any computer equipped with postscript handling utilies like Ghostscript/Ghostview. From the directory containing the Quikscript files copy (or make symlinks to) the Qs scripts Qs, cntpagnm.qs and pdffnt.qs to the directory where you store the score typesetting source files. The source distribution contains a shell script, brand61.sh, with all the commands needed for generation of sheet notes and MIDI file. If your opreating system is DOS based (for example Win98) you might want to edit a .bat file for that purpose. The conversion to pdf is made by means of the ghostscript utility ps2pdf.