[publishing] Additions

• Dowland’s When
  David’s life by Saul was often sought
  . This is actually the second part of a three-part piece; the
  first was Thou
  Mighty God
  , added last week, and the third part is coming next week. This
  typesetting is an experiment in leaving the repeat notation the way
  Dowland wrote it, instead of trying to transcribe it into modern
  structures with first and second endings. I’d say it was a success
  with the Cantabile
  Renaissance Band on Tuesday. See below for a description of how
  this works.
• Odhecatonathon. I’m playing three pieces from the Petrucci
  Odhecaton on Saturday at my recorder teacher’s Student
  Recital, and although we’re all playing directly from the
  facsimile, we found that it’s a lot easier to rehearse if there’s a
  score available. And it’s a lot easier to transcribe them if you have
  a modern score available. The printing is very clear, and much more
  beautiful than the modern printing comes out, but there are cases
  where it’s hard to tell a breve rest from a semi-breve rest from a
  minim rest. So while I had a book with a few scores available, I did
  several.
  • Josquin’s Fortuna
    dun gran tempo
    .
  • Josquin’s La plus
    des plus
    . This is what we’re going to end the set with — the ending sounds
    like a chase scene, but isn’t — it’s just that you can’t tell whether
    the Contra and Cantus are chasing each other because the Tenor is in
    some completely different universe. This is another example of using
    modern segno for the original repeat structure, if Petrucci did intend
    the Segno for
    a repeat.
  • Josquin’s O Venus bant
    .
  • Isaac’s
    Benedictus
    
  • Hayne’s Ales regres
    

Repeat notation

I wrote about this problem last
week. This week, I decided that this was just another case of a
modern innovation that people who want to do music the way they did a
few centuries ago should abandon. So rather than set When
David’s life by Saul was often sought
with a first and second ending, and some parts having a tied note
across the repeat, which I always find confusing, I’m just putting
segno’s in where Dowland did.

One reason this is a better notation for Dowland’s polyphony than
the more modern repeat structure is the difficulty in finding a good
place for the begin repeat. If everybody’s notes were ending on the
beats all the time, there would be no problem. However, in this
piece, there are very few places where there isn’t some part holding
the note over. A releated problem is that Lilypond refuses to print
the whole score unless I break some long notes up, because Lily
refuses to put only part of a note on a line (or indeed, to put only
part of a measure on a line).