Re: Maybe bug? Lyrics on a tied note at end of system

[David Rogers]

James Harkins <address@hidden> writes:

> On Aug 5, 2013 2:59 PM, "James Harkins" <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I appreciate the thought, but I'm not quite interested in that
> particular flavor of Kool-aid. I'll go with my eye on this. I don't
> like how it looks, and I get something that is easier to read by
> fussing with the line breaks. I'm satisfied with that -- the attached
> *does* look perfect to me.


Looks good to me too. If I was going to quibble I would say the over-all
horizontal spacing might be a bit tight - but maybe the whole score
looks good just as it is, and having a tight spot here is worth it.


Maybe drifting off topic...


I just skimmed through a thick volume of the vocal works with piano by
R. Strauss (mostly from Universal Edition and other good German-speaking
publishers of that time). I didn't find any tied-note examples that
would help - but what I did find was impressively wide spacing during
the voice part, and a big easy-to-read text font. In some of the songs,
the piano introductions or interludes have very compressed horizontal
spacing, but as soon as the voice enters, BOOM! luxuriously wide
spacing. That has to help with issues like this. (Also you're clearly
correct that this "anticipatory-tie" situation just doesn't happen that
often in older music.) These scores "look right" overall, with perhaps
an impression of "let's waste some paper and make it perfect". :)

Baerenreiter's (or Schott's?) early-80's setting of Schubert songs -
tight musical spacing with a small thin-ish text font. Looks very good
but the text might get hard to read if the singer's eyes aren't in good
shape. Again, the overall look is consistent with itself, even though
it's quite different from the above. Instead of sacrificing paper (as
above), they sacrificed some text readability.

Peters's well-known old print of the songs of Schumann (and their
Schubert scores look about the same) (no date given, but the editor died
in the 1930s) - the music is fairly tightly spaced, and the lyric font
is dark and perhaps compressed horizontally. Very easy to read IMO, but
maybe I'm just used to that style. This one looks right/consistent to me
as well. In particular, the lyrics are easy to read, while visually
harmonizing with the music - the blackness of the text and the blackness
of the notes are subjectively about even, making it easier to shift my
glance from one to the other without needing to re-focus. (- I
think. I'm not an optometrist.) The sacrifice here is that the whole
thing can turn out too tight, crammed onto the page. I guess if I was
printing a very large collection of short songs I might settle for
cramped spacing as well.

BUT (for example) if I were to take the big, wide-open text font from
the Strauss score and use it in the 1980s Schubert score, I suspect the
words wouldn't even fit in the lines. Each publisher found an effective
working setup that looks good, but they each solved the problems in
different ways.


What I take from looking at these scores is that to set primarily-vocal
music really well, it's necessary to spend time before you start, making
sure that your text font, your over-all horizontal spacing, and your
notation font all work together to automatically give a good-looking
result most of the time; and remembering that if you change any one of
those you'll likely have to change the others to match it.

It seems to me that Lilypond's beginnings were based purely on
instrumental music, that Lilypond's lyrics were (and are) sort of an
uncomfortable add-on with very limited flexibility (compared to how
musically-flexible Lilypond is), and that the kind of extensive thought
and experimentation with challenging vocal scores that the old
publishers obviously put into their choices has not been done yet with
Lilypond; so finding workable proportions to accommodate text, notes,
and horizontal spacing is to some extent left up to each user. I think
Lilypond's default text font is a very reasonable choice from a (free-)
software point of view but only a fair-to-OK choice from a lyrics point
of view. This is probably because fonts that are excellent from a lyrics
point of view are non-free or hard-to-find or both. (In general, in my
experience, lyric fonts for classical music are very traditional-looking
according to late 19th-century expectations, able to be tightly spaced,
perhaps horizontally somewhat compressed, and - very importantly - use
lots of ink. The "jazz-style" fonts with their thick lines are certainly
better for any lyric than spidery elegant light-coloured fonts would
be.) If it was possible to compress and blacken Knuth's "Computer
Modern" but keep it looking good, that would be on the right track at
least. (That font seems to be in the right general style category, but
it's much too light and airy for lyrics. The small-size variants of
Computer Modern are blacker, but they're also wider and spaced looser,
and that's the opposite of what seems to be needed here.)  And copying
the text:notation:spacing proportions of the old Peters edition vocal
scores would go a long way as well. In those books, the font sizes and
music sizes and spacing all work together very well, and they achieved
pretty tight spacing while still mostly looking good.


I just realized that what I probably want for a lyrics font is "The
stereotypical dynamics font, but not italic". No surprise there, I
suppose.


-- 
David R