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

[Carl Peterson]

On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 5:10 PM, David Rogers <address@hidden> wrote:

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.

I'm curious...did you happen to notice any examples where the engraver chose to split the measure that might be indicative of an approach? If I were to have done something like this for a hymnal/songbook, I would have split the measure and would have kept the entire lyrical phrase on a single system.

Carl