Re: An unusual marking

[Richard Shann]

On Mon, 2016-08-01 at 14:30 +0200, Mats Bengtsson wrote:
> 
> 
> > 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.

Hmm, that was idiotic of me not to see that, sorry!

>  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.

I think the Mannheimer crescendo was a rather different thing - a
crescendo stretching over several bars, coordinated between the
different players. This mark is intended just to instruct the violinist.
I would guess that instrumentalists (and singers) had been making
expressive gestures like this since time immemorial, but here we start
to see the composer taking an active role is suggesting it.

> 
> 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.

yes, I had in mind creating something like the original, really just
because I wasn't sure what it meant, and so didn't want to make it
explicit.


> 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).

ah, yes, in fact Coulés have a whole menu item devoted to generating
them in Denemo (using some LilyPond syntax which someone on this list
pointed me to IIRC). In this case ( a "flute" version) they won't be
used...

Thanks for the thoughtful reply,

Richard



> 
>      /Mats
> 
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