At 10:06 AM 06/17/03, Richard Huggins wrote:

>Count me as one of those latter ones who wants to follow "official"
>hy-phen-a-tion, so as to have a literate publication. A composer could, I
>presume, specify something different for, in his view, anyway, interpretive
>reasons or some other reason, but very much of that and you'd almost have to
>add a footnote to the piece.

I've seen some choral scores in which standard hyphenation is set aside in
order to put all consonants after the hyphen.  The obvious intent here is
to remind the singers not to say the consonant too soon.  This practice is
rather peculiar looking, especially when it means eliding a final consonant
to the next word. I tend to think of it as a halfway house toward the
phonetic spellings one sees in some other choral parts.

Good hyphenation can make a difference in readability.  Among the many
incorrect hyphenations in the piano-vocal score of Vaughan Williams' Sea
Symphony (Stainer & Bell) is "un-i-ver-sal", with a page break after
"un-i-", which tends to mislead singers into pronouncing it like the
beginning of "unidentified".

Even correct hyphenations can sometimes be misleading over a page turn.  I
have a distant memory of a rather comical one in some choral work I
performed years ago, but I can't remember what the word was.  A smart
editor/engraver will avoid such a page turn or maybe add the upcoming
syllable in parentheses (which is what we all pencil in anyway).

Ordinary hyphenation comes easily to me, perhaps due to years as an
editor/typesetter.  What trips me up occasionally is knowing how to
hyphenate little words which would never be hyphenated in normal text, like
"any".

mdl


_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Reply via email to