On Jul 2, 2006, at 5:23 AM, Owain Sutton wrote:
One is creating every conceivable block in
advance, to ensure that every ligature can be preserved. The more
practical situation is making a smaller set of blocks which enables the
printing of some common ligatures, at the expense of others.
I agreed with you too soon RE the number of blocks required to notate
16th-c. ligatures. Now I've done the math, and find that beside brevis
blocks (which have use outside of ligatures), exactly 88 blocks are
required to print every possible white-note ligature except some
hypothetical outré and bizarre forms (an upstem longa on two ledger
lines above the staff, for instance). The black notes? Any music
printer of this period would have them, since Gregorian missals and
breviaries would have made up the firm's bread and butter. A surviving
handwritten list of punches and matrices reproduced in the book I've
been referencing confirms this.
Another interesting point of possible relevance here is that apparently
few copies of any one block were kept on hand (this goes for text as
well as music), so that compositors were kept very busy indeed,
resetting the text almost every line, or even partial line, and sending
the page through the press many times before it was complete.
Does Finale ship with fonts which cover every possible detail of
musical
notation? ;)
No, but can it be made to cover them? Yes. Do engravers regularly make
the effort to fill such gaps? Likewise yes.
Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/
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