Re: Ties between words in lyrics

[David Wright]

On Wed 14 Sep 2016 at 18:49:03 (-0700), James Evensen wrote:
> When I said "tie," I meant that general family of expressive marks as I
> wasn't sure how to refer to them in the context of lyrics.

Well I've always called them ties if only because the character
itself is called an undertie (Unicode 0x203F), plus the fact that
they're always horizontal.

> In fact, while
> I would like the use of any type of curve, the dotted slur is the notation
> I want to use.

I can't understand the logic of making it dotted. To me, a dotted slur
indicates that sometimes it's required, sometimes not. The reason
might be strophic lyrics (as in the ding-dong example I attached
earlier) or multiple languages where the underlay, perhaps even the
note lengths, differ.

Because a lyric tie joins two particular words, none of that
variability applies, which is why I wouldn't dot it. If I felt
it was rather editorial to insert it, I'd add [].

> It sounds though that support for this kind of notation with lyrics isn't
> here yet.  I'm inserting "n.b." as markup where the choir isn't supposed to
> breathe at the moment, but if this ever gets added, I'd be most interested.
> 
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 10:37 AM, Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > > In choral music, I've noticed that the composer will sometimes use this
> > notation to indicate that the singer is not to breathe in-between two
> > particular words.
> >
> > In my experience, the more standard/accepted way is to have a dotted slur
> > between the notes, with the lyric-slur reserved for true elisions. In fact,
> > I’ve *never* seen what you’re talking about, despite having sung in and
> > composed for choirs for thirty years. Do you have references/scans that you
> > can share?

Your emphatic *never* made me worry that Willcocks and OUP were
perhaps the only people who did this (and I have loads of OUP choral
music), but then it occurred to me that if you rub shoulders only with
urtext publishers: Peters, Breitkopf & Härtel, Bärenreiter and the
like, you might never see such practical markings as occur in what one
could call "performance editions", designed for mass markets and
amateur singers. Copies that have things like breath marks,
apostrophised words, and cautionary accidentals that good singers don't need.

So I glanced at a few other publishers' works on my shelves and came across:

Novello "The Novello book of carols":
Several in the two versions of "Noël Nouvelet".
One in Riley's "Our Lady's Lullaby".

Shorter House "Sing evensong":
Earis's "God grant us grace" (overriding the punctuation).

Hymnbooks where the verses are written underneath the score
are stuffed full of "carry-overs" at the line breaks.
Then I remembered that some English-style hymnbooks transcribe
plainsong hymns with the lyrics between the tune and an organ
accompaniment. Here are a few:

Norwich Press "Hymns A&M Revised (1950)":
"Now, my tongue", v2, ...condescending‿ To be born...
"O Lord Jesus, I adore thee", v3, ...whatsoever‿ Will...
"Thee we adore, O hidden Saviour", v3, ...may know‿ The hope...
The way they're printed, it looks as if, like LP, they're
challenged in this area (the gap after the ‿ ).

Let me know if these references are too obscure and you require more scans.

Cheers,
David.