Ratio black and whole noteheads

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

addressing a question I received about the attached score where the
dotted crotchet in r.h. (middle of the excerpt) was considered to be
placed too far to the left I investigated why this looks weird.

Gould doesn't give a proper example of a whole note in parallel with a
black note (at least I didn't find one) but some older editions seem to
indicate that the left-alignment is considered standard.

But Gould states that the semibreve note head should be wider than the
black notehead by the proportion of 2 1/2 to 3. And as you can see from
the attached excerpt LilyPond has a ratio of ca. 2 to 3, meaning that
the semibreve is considerably wider than Gould's suggestion.

I'm not sure what to do about this, but I have to agree that in the
given example score this ratio looks bad. So I'd like to have a
discussion about it here. Maybe it's a quite massive modification but
should be consider making the whole note notehead smaller/narrower?

Urs

whole-size.png
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notehead-ratio.png
Description: PNG image