Re: Odhecaton (Was: Re: 1.4.7.jcn1 for windows])

[William R. Brohinsky]

Actually, I don't have copies of Petrucci's music that _have_ fusa or
semifusa rests, that I know of.

In Petrucci's time, the tactus fell on the breve or semibreve. The
smallest notes in Odhecaton are fusae, which always occur in a pair
following a dotted minim: what I'd translate into dotted-quarter,
sixteenth sixteenth. There is no instance at all where a fusa or
semifusa appears alone, so there's no occurance of fusae or semifusae
rests. Likewise, the nothing smaller than minims are ever used as
'pickups'.

I have semiminim rests from 50 years after, in the publications of
Antonio Gardane, which I'd be glad to scan for you at whatever
resolution you find useful. Gardane used the one-type per symbol
approach, so he has dashed lines instead of solid ones for staves, and
his notes are heavy and blockish and very much lower-quality. His fusea
rests fill about 3/4th's of the space between lines, are 90-degree, with
the horizontal a bit shorter than the vertical, an inside radius that is
extremely small, and the outside radius coming from well right of the
right side of the vertical on top down to the top of the vertical. 

A copy of the note/rest page from Berhusius' 1558 tretise (a sadly small
and undersampled scan) which appeared in Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum
(http://www.music.indiana.edu/tml/)  can be found at
http://ocelot.cc.purdue.edu/~raybro/bnotes.gif and shows another font
set from a few years later, generally looking worse, rather than better.
It does have fusa and semifusa rests shown. They're rather garish 8^)
and to be honest, TML's scans are all so low-resolution as to be next to
useless to a period-founder.

As far as I'm aware, Petrucci published no tretises that would have
necessitated adding rests smaller than semiminim rests to his font sets,
so I'd doubt that I'll ever be able to come up with scans of them, but
I'll keep looking.

raybro

Juergen Reuter wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, William R. Brohinsky wrote:
> 
> > I haven't been doing lilypond long enough to have entered a large
> > score--at the moment I have 30 of the 96 Odhecaton songs set, each one
> > being less than 3 whole pages of 3,4 or 5 part polyphonic music. The
> > largest ones, I expect to take up 4 pages on letter-sized paper.
> >
> 
> By the way, do you have scans of fusa and semifusa rests (preferably from
> Petrucci, for the sake of consistency)?  The patch that I just sent
> to the devel list includes these rests, but since I do not have
> high-quality facsimiles showing these rests, the result looks a little bit
> odd.  The same problem holds true for the semifusa flags, which I sent
> recently.
> 
> Greetings,
>            Juergen