At 5:55 PM -0400 10/15/06, Christopher Smith wrote:
Mark,
Thanks for a great overview about lyric spacing. One thing you
didn't mention at all is how the rhythmic value of the note might
affect spacing, particularly if there is a long syllable on a short
note value, like "through" on a sixteenth. I seem to run into this
an awful lot, and I can NEVER get a measure with this combination in
it to look right, no matter what I do. Possibly this is because I
don't really know what takes precedence over what.
I'm enjoying this discussion quite a lot, but I feel that I have to
point out something that should be quite obvious. Text will ALWAYS
change notational spacing. ALWAYS! It is not a problem to be
solved, or a defect in our notational system. It goes with the
territory, and has ever since Guido's 11th century developments.
If you've ever worked with medieval manuscripts, or even Petrucci's
early 16th century prints, you realize that in just about EVERY case
they entered the texts first, before the notes. (I think that's
absolutely true of Petrucci's triple-impression method: 1st time
through the press, print the staff lines--we know because some pages
have staves on them that were not actually used; 2nd time through the
press any text on the page; 3rd time through the press the notes, set
to more-or-less match the text.)
Text takes more room than notes, in general and almost always, unless
you have the world's most humongous melismas as in Handel arias.
Medieval scribes used quite a few shorthand tricks to cut down on the
space taken by texts, but even so there always seems to be plenty of
space to place the notes over the text. And placing notes
more-or-less accurately (but not always!) is something they did take
some care about.
It can even be a problem in modern chant books like the Liber, when
the text is compressed to the point where hyphens are omitted, but
the point is that the text should NEVER be that compressed just to
make the note spacing pretty.
'Nuff said. Notation was originally INVENTED for texted music.
Compromise is necessary and inevitable.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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