Hi all,
sorry for my late response...
Yes, Gregorian Chant in its original form (i.e. the monophonic chant,
but not the use of neumes in later periods as Notre Dame) do not
use any meter. Hence, I think, when transcribing, there is no point in
displaying stems or even a time signature. And at least for all
publications of transcribed Gregorian chant that I have seen here in
Germany, none of them uses stems or a time signature. So +1 from me
for turning these off by default.
GregorianTranscriptionStaff is _not_ applicable for works of Notre Dame
period, since they changed the musical meaning of the neumes. For
example, punctum and virga now take the role of brevis and longa,
respectively [1]. (Actually, maybe this has been the first time in
history that the "stem" of the virga has been re-defined from the
original articulation meaning to a rhythmic meaning?) This means,
for transcribing works from Noter Dame period, you need a completely
different (and more complex) transcription logic; i.e. you probably
would implement this as a new NotreDameTranscriptionStaff.
Additionally, there may be exceptional cases in comtemporary music,
e.g. when a composer "embeds" Gregorian chant melodies into his own,
contemporary works, and thus assigns a fixed rhythm. An example is
Maurice Duruflé's opus 10, "Quatre motets sur des thémes grégoriens".
But I think, you can not easily automize embedding transcribed chant in
such a case, since it is then up to the composer's discretion which
duration to assign each indidual note of the transcribed music; there
are no fixed rules. Hence, again, I think there is no point in using
stems or time signatures when transcribing Gregorian chant.
Best wishes,
Jürgen
[1] Willi Apel: Die Notation der polyphonen Musik, Dritter Teil:
Schwarze Notation, III. Quadratnotation, 1. Allgemeine Bemerkungen (S.
238).
P.S.: I have cc'd to lilypond-devel@gnu.org, but my past view emails to
lilypond-devel seem to have been filtered out or blocked. If this will
happen again for this e-mail, feel free to forward to the list, if you
wish.
On Fri, Sep 9, 2022 at 5:44 AM Dan Eble <dan@lyric.works> wrote:
On Aug 1, 2022, at 10:44, Lukas-Fabian Moser <[1]l...@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> fwiw, I'm a bit confused about the GregorianTranscriptionStaff
context - for example, in the typical liturgical situations where
one uses a "modern" staff for notating Gregorian chant, one usually
doesn't use stems.
I've been going through the documentation, and it seems that all
examples of transcribing Gregorian chant remove the time signature.
I propose that we remove it from GregorianTranscriptionStaff and use
that in the examples:
[2]https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/merge_requests/1614
—
Dan
References
1. mailto:l...@gmx.de
2. https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/merge_requests/1614
