Re: Draft: Extended mensural notation support

[Lukas Pietsch]

Joram Berger <joram.noeck <at> gmx.de> writes:

> once again, I am no expert on ancient notation. So I don't know whether the
> length of the stems in your renaissance style are required to be exactly
as long
> as they are now. They roughly end in the middle of a staff space for notes on
> this position and on a staff line for notes on a staff line – but not quite.
> My aesthetic feeling would prefer it if these stems are about 5% - 10% of a
> staff space longer to make the visual impression that the ‘bubble’/the thicker
> end of the stem is centred visually between the staff lines or on the
staff line
> and not just reaching a very tiny bit over it as it is now.
> 

Thanks, I think that's a very good suggestion. Should be easy enough to tweak.

> Two more questions:
> - What usage scenarios are you thinking about for these styles?
>   A complete renaissance score to reproduce a historic original, incipits,
>   renaissance and modern staffs in the same score, anything else?
> - How easy would is it to reuse the musical content of an ancient staff in a
>   modern staff to show a modern equivalent?

I think the most frequent use scenarios would be incipits and snippets for
musicological discussions and the like. The most complex scenario is
probably passages printed with the ancient original glyphs but in a modern
score arrangement, as is sometimes needed in musicology (and that's the main
scenario where out-of-the-box support for the actual durations/meters and
the like really becomes crucial.

I know some people are interested in the idea of being able to print a
mensural and a modern score from the same source, i.e. having a conversion
function from mensural to modern note values. As a basic idea that's doable,
but it gets quite difficult once you hit some of the intricacies of shifted
meters, proportions and so on. I once had a draft of such a conversion
script which got most of a simple score about right, but pushing it the rest
of the way would be a real challenge. 

Lukas