A main idea question with competing views tests whether you can tell what the whole text says about its topic. Name the topic, then find where the text turns from one view toward another. Ask how the later details support or limit the point after that turn. Predict one sentence that includes the point and its important limits. A wrong choice may use a true detail while drawing a conclusion stronger than the whole text supports.
Hints
- Hint 1
Read the sentence that introduces Voss and separate her view from the historians’ view.
- Hint 2
Compare the sentence about replacing the middle with the next sentence. Look for what changes and what stays in place.
- Hint 3
Use the annotations and the last sentence to check the limits of your summary. How do those details fit into Voss’s response to the historians?
Step-by-step
Follow the disagreement and its limits
Step 1Find the view Voss challenges
The historians treat the rise of printed cadenzas as evidence that improvisation vanished. What does Voss challenge? She says publication counts alone cannot establish that inference, so she questions what those counts prove. For the main idea, we need Voss’s point about printed cadenzas and improvisation, not the claim she challenges.
- Step 2
Read the changes and their limits
What do the performances show instead? Players often kept a printed cadenza’s opening and ending while changing its middle, but their departures usually followed the edition’s overall length and harmonic route. A new middle still generally fit how long the cadenza lasted and how its harmonies moved. The printed music guided the changes without stopping them.
- Step 3
Weigh preparation and differences
The annotations show that some variation was planned in advance, so changing the printed music wasn’t always the same as inventing music onstage. Did the players all change it by the same amount? Lesser-known players changed less than virtuosos, but neither group followed the editions uniformly. We can predict the point: printed editions guided performances without making them all alike.
- Step 4
Connect the findings to the claim
What follows for the historians’ claim that improvisation quickly vanished? Performers’ continued changes mean that publication alone can’t prove an end to improvisation. The choice saying printed cadenzas reshaped improvisation explains how the practice changed: players followed the printed plan but changed it to different degrees. Choice A.