florida state university college of music performance practice

APPENDIX J
TIMING TABLES
The tables that follow list the temporal lengths of complete choral movements or
those that feature soloist and choir within the St. John Passion. In an effort to acquire
every available commercial recording of the St. John Passion, thirty-eight recordings
were successfully obtained. Of these, two were DVDs and 36 were Compact Discs.
In examining length of time, I measured the length of the actual performance from
onset to final decay, not the listed length time of the track. Tracks usually include many
seconds of “lead in” or “dead” time thus not truly reflecting the actual time of
performance. Timing the movements was accomplished with a stopwatch that included
information regarding minute, second and one-hundredth of a second. In the
performances that were recorded in reverberant spaces care was taken to determine the
precise moment the primary sound terminated from consequent multiple echoes.
Submitted entries are arranged according to year. In the case of more than one
recording for a given year, the entries are arranged alphabetically under the conductor‟s
last name. For the movements where it is not self-explanatory, I have noted the actual
measure I began timing using as reference the edited urtext edition of the St. John
Passion by Arthur Mendel, published by Bärenreiter TP 197.
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