Re: Old Music Fingering Example

[Erik Sandberg]

On Wednesday 19 January 2005 23.18, David Raleigh Arnold wrote:
> The examples in the documentation portray the placing of finger
> numbers after notes as respectable.  If you look at this file, which
> has left hand fingering well done, you will see that it is not.  I
> don't think you can find a single instance of a finger number directly
> after a note.  There is only one in an edition I have from a plate
> engraved in 1853.  I don't know how old this one is, but they have the
> awful "classical" quarter rest instead of the s-z rest, introduced
> about 1810.  The point is that these engravers were conservative to a
> fault.
>
> There is no effort at all to keep fingering off of staff lines.  In
> mine there is absolutely no fingering on leger lines though.
>
> The idea seems to be that the fingering, and even sometimes the
> dynamics(!), should flow along with the notes.  See for yourself.
> This is from the Royal Danish Library "RIBS" collection.  It is the
> third part of Carcassi's "Complete Method", arguably the most
> sucessful music publication of all time, in print continuously since
> 1838.  You can see a lot of big names on the cover.  See the top line
> of No. 7 for fingering with sharps.
>
> http://www.kb.dk/elib/noder/rischel/RiBS0086.pdf

Thanks for this report! Certainly you seem to be right; fingerings can (and 
should) be inside staves in the most well-engraved 19th century scores.

However, this score was written with different ideals than lilypond tries to 
live up to. I think Lily is closer to the German mid-20th century engraving, 
which you can see on the fonts (e.g. clefs, quarter rests), and dynamic 
placement etc.

I don't know much about this mid-20th century engraving, and I don't own any 
scores with fingerings in them, so I can't give an answer to whether the 
standard you suggest should be the default one. Your arguments are IMHO 
enough to motivate that this kind of fingering spacing should exist as an 
option. 

However, I'm not skilled in the art engraving to know anything about this, so 
I leave the decision to the other developers.

Anyway, I added an example to bug CVS, as fingering-staff-lines.ly. (I also 
marked it as unclear)

Erik