Re[2]: "Hymn template" snippet

[Trevor]

Dan, you wrote 09/08/2022 13:33:11

> On Aug 9, 2022, at 08:26, Kieren MacMillan <kieren@kierenmacmillan.info> wrote:
> >  The big difference, in my mind — as composer, arranger, conductor, and 
> > performer — is that a caesura is generally longer than a comma/breath, and 
> > intentionally interrupts the flow of the overall line, whereas the comma/breath 
> > usually doesn't (or at least doesn't in as dramatic a manner).
> >
> >  In musical theatre scores, the caesura is used almost exclusively when the 
> > music completely stops and is restarted ‘from silence’ in the next phrase — 
> > indeed, the caesura is quite often coupled with a fermata — whereas the 
> > comma/breath is really only used in situations where the singer/performer 
> > literally needs a little time to phrase off (either for dramatic or 
> > technical/breathing purposes) but the music [in the accompaniment] basically 
> > continues unbroken.
> Thanks.  Those are the intended semantics of the \breathe and \caesura commands 
> in the code that is under development.
Given those intended semantics, \breathe is the correct command for 
taking a breath between lines in a verse of a hymn. This is quite a 
different situation from the use of a caesura in musical theatre, which 
usually indicates a quite significant pause in the music.

> Also, what about the bar lines?
I don't know why the thin double line is used at the end of some phrases 
and the comma is used elsewhere; when there is a pick-up the thin double 
line is not even at the end of a bar, although it is always at the end 
of a line of the verse. In hymn books both the comma and the thin double 
line are more to do with helping the sight-reading singer to re-locate 
his/her place in the music after glancing at the next line of the 
current verse (verses are never printed within the music) rather than 
indicating where breaths are to be taken. So the purpose of both commas 
and thin double lines is more to do with showing how the lines of each 
verse fit the music. I can't find anything in Gould about this use of 
the thin double line, but it is the way hymn books are usually written.

In more modern hymn books there is a movement to use thin double lines 
throughout rather than commas to show how the lines of the verse map 
onto the music, although settings of traditional hymns usually retain 
the commas (see Common Praise).

Trevor