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I specialize in 18th-century Scottish music and generally find that the hand-engraved copperplate printing from the 18th-century produces more readable music th
by tsm 3y ago
I specialize in 18th-century Scottish music and generally find that the hand-engraved copperplate printing from the 18th-century produces more readable music than modern editions. I also play stuff like Corelli sonatas (easy to read) from facsimiles and Playford tunes (17th century, woodblock printing) from facsimiles. The Playford is fine for me, but I'd understand it if people wanted to transcribe it.
I used to play with a Renaissance group that played ca. 1500 music (published by Petrucci himself!) and they transcribed it into urtexts, which I appreciated. Two big factors in that were a) using more comfortable clefs b) turning something written in parts into a score. It's helpful to see what the harmonic situation is, and playing off a score makes that much easier.
- analog31 3y agoIt's interesting that music notation has taken a long time for computer generated music to be as readable as good hand copy. And the people I know who do it by computer tell me that it's a lot of work to go from basic data entry to a readable layout. This becomes apparent reading jazz band charts in a hazy bar. Also, chord symbols are possibly the only respectable use of Comic Sans!
- kjellsbells 3y agoNon musical outsider here. Ive heard this kind of claim before, that older typeset documents just have a look about them that is better. IIRC Knuth said it about old mathematical texts, and I vaguely recall the creators of GNU Lilypond writing it about sheet music. Can you comment on what good sheet music typesetting looks like, or is it something intangible that you just "know it when you see it"?
- analog31 3y agoGood question. Here's an article showing an image from the original "Real Book." This is hand written. http://www.thepianoshed.com/teaching-blog/the-truth-about-the-real-book http://www.thepianoshed.com/teaching-blog/the-truth-about-th... Amusingly, it's about the controversy over whether the chord changes are accurate or not. Now, this style has heavily influenced how jazz "lead sheets" are typeset as well. For instance Chuc Sher's "New Real Book" has a section in the foreword about how they studied the script of the old Real Book before starting their own project. Now a typeset sheet for another tune: https://www.musicforballetclass.com/product/take-the-a-train-piano-sheet-music-pdf/ https://www.musicforballetclass.com/product/take-the-a-train... Notice that the chord symbols are much smaller -- nobody can bring themselves to make the font big enough for some reason. The melody is broken up into awkward groups of 3, 4, and 5 measures. And so forth. It's like trying to write a poem with word wrap turned on. The typical workflow for a jazz chart was that the composer / arranger wrote a score with all of the parts, and sent it to a copyist, who wrote out the individual parts for use by the band. The copyist earned repeat business by the quality of their work.