On Oct 16, 2006, at 9:09 AM, John Howell wrote:
I can't imagine it looking any better, and the lyrics are very clean
and easy to read. (And THANK you for ignoring the old-fashioned
refusal to use beams; makes it SO much easier to read!)
Thanks for the compliment, and to Christopher, too.
I am now inspired to make two observations:
First, I want to deflect some of that compliment to Michael Good, for
being a rare publisher who could recognize, appreciate, and expect high
engraving standards, and who, in spite of not being well-funded
himself, nevertheless managed to come up with enough budget that I
could spend time on details without feeling like I was giving my time
away.
Second, I am absolutely horrified to notice -- not two years ago when
we did this piece, not two days ago when I tracked down the link on the
Recordare site and looked again, but only just TONIGHT -- that the
lyricist's name is mistyped as "W.S. Gibert". How could that have
gotten past me, Michael, both of you, and everyone else who has looked
at the page?!?
--
On Oct 16, 2006, at 9:34 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:
I notice you don't mind eliminating hyphens—that seems to be the right
decision here, though I always hem and haw when I have to do it.
As well you should. It's not a decision I make lightly. I think it's
appropriate here, but I typically think of omitting a hyphen as a
negative. How much of a negative depends on the context and style, and
then there's the matter of what are the alternative negatives it has to
be weighed against.
Even more strongly I resist omitting one hyphen while maintaining
another in a word of three or more syllables, which I think looks
rather bad, though I've occasionally resorted to it. If it's a
compound, I don't feel so bad keeping the middle hyphen and dropping
the others. (That sort of thing comes up quite a bit in German --
unfortunately, if the rhythm is dotqtr-8th-dotqtr-8th, it's usually the
middle hyphen that you have least room for!)
I also noticed that measure 5 is a little wider than it absolutely
has to be, but the balance is quite nice as a result. I imagine
"You've" was the deciding syllable there.
I do think that the wideness of measure 5, relative to the others in
the system, is a negative, but it's necessary to keep the measure
reasonable proportional. To let it get distorted much more would have
been worse, I think.
That whole passage would have given me conniptions, and I would
probably have spread the recit over three systems in a totally
unbalanced way because I couldn't deal with the spacing properly. I
have a lot to learn.
I'm pretty sure it did give me conniptions, which is probably why it's
the one I most remember for citing as an example. (Fortunately the rest
of the song was a breeze, needing only the most routine tweaks, so that
helped even out the workload for the piece.)
I'm sure I wanted to spread the recit into more than two systems, but
the overall page layout didn't take well to that. I don't recall if
this was one of them, but there were times in the course of my
Recordare work when I would write to Michael saying, "This is too tight
and I can't make it fit and still look good, I think we need to go to
another page." Sometimes he'd agree, but other times he'd say, "I've
taken a look, and I think you can make it work. Try again." And that's
another thing he deserves credit for.
mdl
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