Re: Stem direction wrong for white mensural music?

[Phil Holmes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Benko Pál" <address@hidden>
To: "Phil Holmes" <address@hidden>
Cc: "Devel" <address@hidden>
Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2011 9:23 AM
Subject: Re: Stem direction wrong for white mensural music?


> If I compile the following code (the start of Dufay's Ave Regina a3) with
> default settings, the stems follow modern style - some up, some down. For
> ancient music (I'm not sure when this ended, but it certainly applies 
> around
> the period up to 1500) the stems were always up for normal notes; -
> downstems showed other features - e.g. chromatic alteration on German
> tablatures.
>
> It's trivial to fix with a \stemUp, but I'd suggest this is a bug. Does
> anyone else have a view, before I add it to the tracker?

music _prints_ do use downward stems, what's more, it's not at all 
systematical,
see e.g. the example in
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1839#c13
so we are left to apply manual \stemUp's and \stemDown's
(I use a global \stemUp and hack closing longae to \stemDown).

p

_______________________________________________


Thanks.  On the manuscripts I'm looking at, they're all up-stem.  I'm 
assuming the printed version is a later reworking of a manuscript?  Do you 
think the printers adopted more modern methods, or did downstems also creep 
into manuscript music?

--
Phil Holmes