Re: GregorianTranscriptionStaff

[Jürgen Reuter]

   Hi all,

   sorry for my late response...

   Yes, Gregorian Chant in its original form (i.e. the monophonic chant,
   but not the use of neumes in later periods as Notre Dame) do not
   use any meter.  Hence, I think, when transcribing, there is no point in
   displaying stems or even a time signature.  And at least for all
   publications of transcribed Gregorian chant that I have seen here in
   Germany, none of them uses stems or a time signature.  So +1 from me
   for turning these off by default.
   GregorianTranscriptionStaff is _not_ applicable for works of Notre Dame
   period, since they changed the musical meaning of the neumes.  For
   example, punctum and virga now take the role of brevis and longa,
   respectively [1].  (Actually, maybe this has been the first time in
   history that the "stem" of the virga has been re-defined from the
   original articulation meaning to a rhythmic meaning?) This means,
   for transcribing works from Noter Dame period, you need a completely
   different (and more complex) transcription logic; i.e. you probably
   would implement this as a new NotreDameTranscriptionStaff.
   Additionally, there may be exceptional cases in comtemporary music,
   e.g. when a composer "embeds" Gregorian chant melodies into his own,
   contemporary works, and thus assigns a fixed rhythm.  An example is
   Maurice Duruflé's opus 10, "Quatre motets sur des thémes grégoriens".
   But I think, you can not easily automize embedding transcribed chant in
   such a case, since it is then up to the composer's discretion which
   duration to assign each indidual note of the transcribed music; there
   are no fixed rules.  Hence, again, I think there is no point in using
   stems or time signatures when transcribing Gregorian chant.
   Best wishes,
   Jürgen
   [1] Willi Apel: Die Notation der polyphonen Musik, Dritter Teil:
   Schwarze Notation, III. Quadratnotation, 1. Allgemeine Bemerkungen (S.
   238).
   P.S.: I have cc'd to lilypond-devel@gnu.org, but my past view emails to
   lilypond-devel seem to have been filtered out or blocked.  If this will
   happen again for this e-mail, feel free to forward to the list, if you
   wish.

   On Fri, Sep 9, 2022 at 5:44 AM Dan Eble <dan@lyric.works> wrote:

     On Aug 1, 2022, at 10:44, Lukas-Fabian Moser <[1]lfm@gmx.de> wrote:
     >
     > fwiw, I'm a bit confused about the GregorianTranscriptionStaff
     context - for example, in the typical liturgical situations where
     one uses a "modern" staff for notating Gregorian chant, one usually
     doesn't use stems.
     I've been going through the documentation, and it seems that all
     examples of transcribing Gregorian chant remove the time signature.
     I propose that we remove it from GregorianTranscriptionStaff and use
     that in the examples:
     [2]https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/merge_requests/1614
     —
     Dan

References

   1. mailto:lfm@gmx.de
   2. https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/merge_requests/1614