On Oct 15, 2006, at 7:05 PM, John Howell wrote:
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!
Of course it will. If it didn't, we wouldn't be having this discussion
at all. We could just uncheck "lyrics" in the music spacing options
dialog box and let the lyrics fall where they may.
But of course that doesn't work. The lyrics end up poorly spaced and
piled on top of one another and it looks like crap. To always give
precedence to the lyrics is better than the opposite, but it's still
not ideal -- at least not in the sense that Finale does it: centering
every syllable and allowing enough space so that no syllable collides
with an adjacent syllable nor underhangs an adjacent note or barline.
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.
It's not a defect, but it most certainly is a problem to be solved.
Stipulating that good music spacing has value and good lyric spacing
has value, and furthermore that the two sometimes come into conflict,
the problem is how to maximize readability of both together.
It's a difficult problem. Because judgment comes into play, it can't be
easily stated as a set of rules. And even if we all agree on the exact
aesthetic balance (which we never will) it's still very difficult to
state that balance algorithmically.
Text takes more room than notes, in general and almost always, unless
you have the world's most humongous melismas as in Handel arias.
I don't think that's true at all. In many styles of music, it's quite
common to have an accompaniment pattern of running 16th notes with the
lyrics attached predominantly to quarters. In such a situation, you'll
have little or no conflict. That is, you could space the music with no
regard to the lyrics and they'd still come out fine. I'd estimate that
about a quarter or a third of the lieder/art-song repertoire falls in
this category. That's less than a majority, sure, but I don't think
you can say text "almost always" takes more room than notes.
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.
I wouldn't say "never". There are always considerations of layout,
etc. In my experience, a very common failing of printed vocal music is
that the lyrics are printed in text that is too small. The single
greatest improvement one could make to readability is to simply print
the lyrics larger. (This is particularly the case for music which will
be sung unmemorized by an amateur chorus.) If the lyrics are enlarged
then that means either (1) the music is also enlarged, or (2) the
lyrics are now more tight relative to the music. The former runs you
into problems with fitting all the music on the page and adding page
turns, which leaves you with the latter. I agree with you that extreme
compression of lyrics is a bad thing, but at the same time I would
argue that if a house style is generating vocal music where the lyrics
are always loose enough relative to the music that none of these
questions we've been discussing ever arise, that style is probably
printing the lyrics too small and could be improved by enlarging them.
'Nuff said. Notation was originally INVENTED for texted music.
Compromise is necessary and inevitable.
Indeed. But finding the optimal compromise ... that's the puzzle.
I think I've cited this sample before, but a page on Recordare's site
<http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/recordare/SullPina02Sample.pdf> shows a
good example of the tug-of-war between lyrics and music. It's a
recitative from a Gilbert & Sullivan song. Because of the layout,
stretching the recit to a third system is impractical, so by necessity
it is somewhat tight but not impossibly tight. In the sample, the
music and the lyrics are each slightly distorted from their ideal, but
each is close enough to be comfortable. Looking at the page it seems
unremarkable, and you might never guess how much tweaking was necessary
to get to that point. But try setting the same passage from scratch
and you'll see.
The sample pages at the Recordare store offer several interesting
studies in lyric spacing. They're not all perfect, and some are better
than others, but they're all quite good. (Full disclosure: most, but
not all, of Recordare's offerings are my work, including the G&S cited
here.)
mdl
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