John Howell wrote:
the St. Meinrad fonts … are designed not to be used within a notation
program but in, e.g., a program like Word.
Or in a text block in Finale. I have successfully used them by hiding
all the staff lines, and notation, and using the St. Meinrad Fonts in a
text block that appears to be part of a staff.
And be warned that they take over your keyboard and you have to
relearn the placement of all the signs on all the keys.
More accruate, perhaps, to say that they map the individual neumes or
parts of neumes to keys on the keyboard, in a manner not unlike what
Finale does with keyboard entry in Speedy entry.
I was reverse-engineering some music by Hildegard back to chant
notation, and discovered that even by switching clefs the program
would not cover the entire wide range of her music!
If you are using chant notation the way it is designed, it easily covers
the range of more than three octaves. The F clef specifies the location
of "tenor F", if placed on the top line, the lowest note usually notated
in chant would be would be "d" nearly two octaves below middle C (the
second space below the lowest of the four lines of the four line staff),
the highest note usually notated would be with the C clef,.specifying
the location of middle C, on the bottom line of a four line staff, so
that the highest pitch customarily notated with square notation would be
the "e' on the second space above the top line of the four line staff.
Clefs would be freely switched as needed to keep the notation within the
compass of the two spaces above and below the four line staff. This
range is, of course, as theoretical as a composition in 9 sharps; more
conventionally, chant notation is used for melodies that fall within a
range of about a twelfth.
Of course, it should be remembered too, that with Hildegard's music,
both modern notation AND square notation are anachronisitic, as when she
was writing, neither notation system had yet been systematized.
ns
John
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