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

[Carl Peterson]

On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 8:55 PM, David Rogers <address@hidden> wrote:

Carl Peterson <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

I haven't found any examples with ties exactly as we've been
discussing. It seems styles or opinions have changed over time or varied
between publishers. For a good possible example, I turned to the old
Peters score of Schubert's Ständchen (Horch, horch, die Lerch') - nearly
every line of text begins with an upbeat - and the engraver kept each
bar intact. In the same volume, the beginning of Das Wandern (first song
of Die schöne Müllerin) has the piano introduction and the single word
"Das" on the first line, and the end of the last page has (looking a bit
lonely) the first word of the next verse and a segno. However, in the
1988 Baerenreiter/Henle set of Schubert songs, vol 7, the engraver seems
quite willing to break bars in exactly the way I think you mean - for
example, in "Irdisches Glück" the piano introduction finishes on beat
three-and-a-half, and the singer's eighth note is on the next line,
where you and I both know it belongs. :) In the same vein, the middle of
the verse of that song has a new theme that starts on beat
two-and-three-quarters, and the page break is comfortably set at that
point in the bar. But then only a few pages further on in the book, in
Am Fenster, a similar thing might have been done but was not done -
there are "widowed" eighth notes on several lines. It seems to me that
breaking bars in vocal music has never been consistently practiced by
any good publisher except for the publishers of well-made hymn books,
who seem to have done it as a matter of course. If they ARE being
consistent, then they must have run into more important reasons why NOT
to break the bars, in those other songs; and I don't know what those
reasons are. My understanding of the engraving process and its rules is
sketchy at best.

Actually, it's not uncommon for hymnal publishers NOT to give due consideration to the lyrics, well-made or not. I'm looking at one right now where the upbeat of a phrase is kept with the measure. I think the only relatively-consistent rule is not to break a word across two lines unless there's no way to avoid it (and I happened to turn right to a song that proved me wrong, imagine that). There was a hymnal published last year that *did* prioritize lyrics over music, to the point where it did a "quantized" version of LP's ragged-right for shorter lines (so that the lyric spacing doesn't become extreme). By quantized, I mean that there were about three or four system-widths that were used, depending on the natural spacing of the line (number of syllables). I've given examples from that book in previous posts. Of the hymnals I've seen, I consider it perhaps one of the best examples of setting, even above engraved hymnals (which often squeezed notes and lyrics in much tighter than they should have in order to save paper...not uncommon to be lucky just to get all the words on the same line as the notes, and forget about getting the words under the sung note).