Re: An unusual marking

[Mats Bengtsson]

> Does anyone recognize the attached marking (*)
> It seems to be a spanner of some sort, perhaps indicating a cresc. or
> swelling of some sort.
> If so, has anyone got some code to generate it? Without a name, it is
> difficult to search for ...
>
> Richard
>   (*)
> from an early 18th Italian composer, engraved in Paris
> IMSLP342525-PMLP552586-piani_vn_sonatas_op1_foucault.pdf
>   and also in another engraving by Roger in Amsterdam
If you look in the foreword of any of the two editions at IMSLP, the 
notation is described. I don't know French but it seems to describe 
crescendo and diminuendo. See also the biography linked from IMSLP which 
states that this score is the earliest known printed use of crescendo, 
diminuendo and messa di voce (crescendo directly followed by diminuendo, 
on the same note). This also explains why the notation had to be 
described in the foreword.

Interesting! I would have expected this to appear in some score from the 
Mannheimer school, rather than from an Italian composer living in Paris 
half a century before the Mannheimer crescendo became popular.

If you don't care about exact layout, you could use standard 
crescendo/diminuendo arrows in your typesetting, otherwise you probably 
have to use some more or less advanced \markup hack to get the filled 
version used in the original manuscript. Browsing through the original 
engraving, I noted that you also might encounter other notational 
challenges, such as the angled lines between the upper and lower notes 
in the Siciliana (Pages 20-21) in the Foucaut edition), which if I'm not 
mistaken denote a form of Coulé, see 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_(musical_ornament).

    /Mats