On 18 Mar 2005, at 11:42, Darcy James Argue wrote:
I have a small project in which I do want to produce some music that looks handwritten. My own style, pre-computer, was distinctive in that I attached all stems, whether up or down ones, to the right-hand side of note-heads. Is there any way that this can be achieved with Jazz or Inkpen?
John, I'm afraid I think that's an absolutely awful idea. Just because you want a project to look handwritten, that doesn't give you license to make up the rules as you go along. If you really want it to look like authentic manuscript, get a copy of Clinton Roemer's _The Art of Music Copying_ and follow his practices.
There's good and bad handwritten music, just as there is good and bad engraving. Putting all downstems on the right-hand side of the notehead falls squarely in the latter category.
When I was a student, my professor was a stuffy old fool who complained about my habit of always attaching stems to the RH side of noteheads. I stuck to my system because it saved time (if a notehead is 4mm long, each downward stem involves moving the hand back 4mm). Bear in mind this was the 1960s and we also believed that we had just discovered sex.
I became a free-lance arranger. Over several years my hand developed and became fluent. People commented on the visual attractiveness of my scores, copyists told me how easy it was to read them. I took a pride in the layout of my scores, their organisation, and the handwriting.
Computers arrived. One of the first problems I encountered then was that players, given beautifully printed parts, couldn't believe that there was a wrong note there -- it was printed as F# so it must be F#. Some composers and arrangers found that using the Jazz or Inkpen font ameliorated this situation. Players seeing the handwritten font no longer felt that their parts had somehow been authorised by a superior body.
Meanwhile in the outside world multi-national organisations like the Readers Digest were sending out mail in pseudo-handwriting fonts to millions of people asking for their Visa and Mastercard numbers. My father-in-law is 87. However often I tell him to the contrary, he still believes that Readers' Digest is writing personally to him, by hand.
Surely most professional musicians are not so easily fooled. For some years their parts have been computer-generated. They know that these parts are just as prone to human error as any others.
My original question about attaching stems had nothing to do with what is conventional or orthodox, it was just about how to do it. Brad Beyenhof gave me the definitive answer. Thanks Brad.
John
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