"Custos" "the little piece of a note at the end of a line that tells you what the first note on the next line will be?"
-- so that's what those very helpful little buggers are called! John Hetland of the NY Renaissance Street Singers uses them liberally in the music he publishes and I have become a true believer. Is there a Finale Tool or Plug-in, already written, that does just that for Finale scores? "Harmony Assistant" has that feature. Then again Harmony Assistant has lots of neat esoteric things it can do. /Jim Mays -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Howell Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 5:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Finale] Re: Gregorian At 4:12 PM -0500 3/24/05, David W. Fenton wrote: > >I would caution anyone who is not already accustomed to notating >Gregorian (Solesmes) notation and has not direct model to copy from >to use modern notation. I would agree. In one instance I used the St. Meinrad fonts to reverse-engineer a modern edition back to chant notation for my ensemble, but ran into an unexpected problem. Hildegard's music uses a much wider range than almost any Gregorian chant does (one of its distinctive qualities), and I ran out of notes! >It was good enough for the 1982 Episcopal Hymnal, so it ought to be >good enough for modern editions. Certainly, more singers will know >how to interpret it than can sing the Solesmes notation correctly. Certainly true, but it takes me about 10 minutes and a little practice time to teach a new group of singers to read chant notation (as i will do next fall when I again teach Early Music Literature), and I much prefer it. The information it conveys is exactly the information that the singer needs, as I'm sure you realize from your own experience; it's the proper notation for that music. (And why, oh why did we ever stop using that most useful custos--the little piece of a note at the end of a line that tells you what the first note on the next line will be?) My wife found the same with her youth choir at church (ages approximately 9 to 18). They thought nothing of singing from chant notation, or in a variety of foreign languages. (The same could not be said, unfortunately, for members of the senior choir!) >I *know* this notation, having sung full Gregorian chant ordinaries >for years (often at sight), but I would *never* use that notation in >any performing edition, except, perhaps, in incipits to show original >notation (and even then, it's hardly necessary). I might draw a distinction here between an edition intended for performing (under my own or my wife's direction) and an edition intended for publication with the end users unknown. For the latter I would certainly agree with David. John _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
