At 2:30 PM -0700 6/21/04, Mark D Lew wrote:
Beaming is a tricky question. There is a strong tradition in the classical genre to use beaming to indicate syllabification. That is, two notes which are not sung on the same syllable must never be connected by a beam. This originates from the days when long melismas were common, and thus syllabic beaming made the music easier to read.
Actually it originates from the early 16th century printing of music from individual pieces of metal type, each of which had a section of the 5-line staff and a single note or rest.
John
This is not true. In Mediaeval notation (all of wh. was MS, of course), the rule was never to ligature across a syllable break. The rationale for this was that underlay in those days was iffy at best (the music was written down first, and then another scribe would squeeze in the lyrics however possible), so ligature breaks were of great value as a visual clue to the underlay.
Renaissance notational conventions differ from the Mediaeval mostly in that the notes are white instead of black. When beams were first introduced, they were regarded as just another type of ligature, and so the traditional underlay rules were applied to them as well. None of this had anything to do with printing.
-- Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press
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