Phil Taylor wrote: > > Paulo Eleut�rio Tib�rcio wrote: > [skip] > > I'm in need of some to encode > >Gregorian Chant, for instance, and I think I'll have to add more variety > >to > >the already existent for that). > > Have you looked at <http://www.barfly.dial.pipex.com/bfgregorian.html)? > This scheme is followed by BarFly and by Melody/Harmony assistant, and > involves minimal changes to allow abc to represent Gregorian Chant. > > (Basically, it's just an addition to the K: field to specify which of > the eight possible clefs is in use, and some reinterpretation of the > standard abc symbols when a Gregorian clef is specified.) >
Thanks for the link, it's a good starting point. I tried to check your references on the page ( http://www.netaxs.com/~rmk/Chant/index.html and http://home.mcn.net/~relbooks/gf_salve.gif ), but they seem to be gone. I'm a member of the Coral Gregoriano de Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais, Brazil - http://www.gregoriano.org.br ), maintained by the Father Nereu de Castro Teixeira Cultural Society where I've been a student of Gregorian Chant for the past seven years. We follow the school of Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, whose aim is to restore the performance of the pieces as close as possible to the original medieval interpretation based on the study of the paleographic manuscripts. Their findings have been gradually incorporated to the typesetting of the Church's official GC books in square notation; some of these also carry the paleography for the pieces (e.g., the _Graduale Triplex_). As our repertoire is in the official chant books (available), typesetting them for the choir is not the issue. But we offer courses in Gregorian Chant, and production of handouts mixes typesetting the words and calculating white space to add the musical samples to a paper copy, so the document can't be computer-stored as a whole. The requirements I am trying to meet are the following: 1. A typesetting style compatible with those of the past 50 years, making possible as close a representation as possible of one or other printed version so the samples in the handout matches what the student will find in the official chant book available; 2. A typesetting for the paleographical notation, at least for the neumatic signs of Saint-Gall; 3. Automated audio rendering of the notation in MIDI (including as much of the semiological tokens as feasible) as a learning aid; 4. And, of course, typesetting in modern notation according to the the conventions usually followed by the Church books (useful for studying GC choir conduction and for typesetting pieces for occasions when a large group of non-gregorian singers are expected to join in). To me, abc matches Gregorian Chant in simplicity, so it is a better candidate for creating sources than an entirely new system I might design; also it is an open format, so GC coded in abc would be accessible to a large community. Then, the problem I face is to represent GC in abc so as to meet my needs and at the same time keeping the code fairly readable by existing pieces of software. Some of the solutions you designed for BarFly are good; others are likely to comply with one style of singing while excluding others (e.g., repeated pitches on the same syllable, which you tie up for one long note as in some schools, should be, according to Solesmes, sang as as many repeated notes, i.e., as written). I like the way you indicate liquescence; that was one problem I was still trying to solve. Also I like the S and Q in the beginning of the new melodic fragment (I was using !shortphrase! and the like, but these are required to be attached to the last note of the previous fragment, which I find distracting). Now, to represent all that information in abc would require a lot of extensions and the notation might get a little cluttered. I'd like to make the source readable and easily editable (that's the reason I've chosen abc, in the first place; SGML/XML might be usable, but would make code more complex to edit by hand). Maybe I'll have to think of splitting the information among several layers (as abc does for lyrics). More ideas are welcome. (BTW, when you talk about the horizontal episemata (K in BarFly), you seem to imply that they always apply to the whole block of notes that follow. Well, they don't always; in fact, almost any note in a group may be episematic, i.e., the episema is a feature of the note to which it is attached, applying to the next only in specific cases. Also you shouldn't miss a horizontal episema in the modern notation, as it generally indicates that the note is to be slightly hold or to receive some expression or emphasis; not so for the vertical episema, because while the former is represented in the manuscripts, the latter was introduced in the modern square notation as an aid to rhythm and is under revision.) Thanks again. Paulo E. Tib�rcio To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
