Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Oh, to be clear, I'm not talking about olde musicke notation, itself, rather the editorial standards that modern scholarly editors have adopted to present old music in modern notation.

Not that this has anything to do with dglenn's notational question, but the reason modern editors have stopped using ties is that many feel they connotate something rhythmically different than the original tie-less notation. We can see this in dglenn's examples. The 4/4 with triplets is very clearly triplets-within-binary-time. It's unambiguous. But the 12/8 has some ambiguity. For instance, is the second A a strong beat? There's a couple ways to syncopate that measure as written. The feeling in historical music is that if the original was ambiguous as to how it should be played, we should be careful when transcribing into modern notation that we don't remove ambiguity, implying to the reader a single interpretation which was not explicit in the original.

The reason that those ties are easier to read is that they make manefest the underlying four-beat structure of the measure -- it asserts the easiest possible rhythmic structure. It makes it easier to read by making the music easier. But maybe the composer (in this case dglenn) wants that ambiguity to there, to either allow the reader to interpret or to encourage the reader to down-play the 4/4 tactus.