Category: Publishing

The new Dowland,
Welcome,
Black Night, has an extended Alto solo with no
accompaniment except the lute. So I transcribed the lute. I think
I’ll be doing more of this, now that I have my cheat sheets with the
ABC names of the strings and the interval names of the letters almost
memorized.

The new Dowland, Up merry mates, has an extended tenor solo with no
accompaniment except the lute, so I was inspired to transcribe the
lute tab into normal notation so that a keyboard player could play
it. I know lute players sneer at this, because to do a real keyboard
transcription you would have to look at all the voicings of the chords
and figure out which notes to let ring into the next chord, but it
really seemed to add something to our rehearsal. I haven’t figured
out how to make lilypond print the actual tablature, so there’s just
the notation, which means it probably isn’t well proofread.

I continued the transcription of the Gervaise fifth book with
“Huict Bransles de Poictou”.

In a previous
entry, I had lamented the fact that I hadn’t come up with a
plausible set of words for van Eyck’s En fin
l’Amour. One of the places I reported having looked was in Ruth
van Baak Griffioen’s book about van Eyck, and she read the blog and
wrote me the following explanation:

About the mention on your site of the facsimile of a setting of the
“En fin l’amour” tune in the Van Eyck book: the reason I did not
translate the Dutch text for that song is because the Dutch text is
just a text found in a Dutch songbook along with instructions to sing
it to the tune “En fin la’mour”. But that Dutch text has no actual
relation to the original French text; it’s not a translation of it,
or a paraphrase. If Van Eyck had chosen to identify the tune by this
or any other Dutch contrafactum text, I would have provided a
translation. But Van Eyck refers to the song by the French original,
and that text hasn’t been found (yet). I only translated the Dutch
texts when they matched the title used in Der Fluyten Lust-hof, and
the reason is that once you simply pick one contrafactum text like
the one shown in the facsimile, you’re into a pretty random selection
criterion. For example, look at the top of page 173, just to the
right of the facsimile you mention: a dozen or so *other* Dutch
contrafactum texts are listed, all of which were meant to be sung to
the “En fin” tune. Again, Van Eyck’s piece is known by the French
‘ancestor’ text to all of those, not to any of the Dutch knock-off
texts. Almost every one of the songs on which the Lust-hof
variations are based have anywhere from a handful to a hundred of
such contrafactum possibilities, so the only really sensible way to
go about providing texts is to give the ones that match the title Van
Eyck uses, or sometimes a 17th-c singable direct Dutch translation
thereof. Hope this explains why I left off the Dutch translation
you wanted to have! It’d kind of be like printing the text to “Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” when what was
really meant was the actual original “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Or, even more directly, any one, say, of a hundred French social
satire song texts meant to be sung to that tune, none of which had
anything to do with the Civil War or the Second Coming and none of
which became well-enough known to supplant the title “The Battle
Hymn…”

Sorry for the long explanation; I didn’t have time to write a short one.

Dowland

The newest from the Pilgrim’s Solace is “My heart and tongue were
twins.” It’s a really nice one, and not as difficult as some of the
other recent ones.

We did it a fourth down from the original key.

Isaac

We’ve been doing these as relaxing things for the end of a hard
rehearsal for quite a while, but for some reason they didn’t make it
to the web until today.

“Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen” is well-known to most church
musicians as a hymn tune; here’s Isaac’s original setting, and a
double canon version.

Gervaise

We enjoyed the Bransles de Champaigne so much that I did “Dix
Bransles Gays” from the same book.

Sermisy

This is another one that I did some years ago, and just got around
ot putting up on the web now. John Tyson uses the tune to “Tant que Vivrai” with his
students for ornamentation practice. So I’d entered it so that I
could use the MIDI file to practice with, but never fixed up the word
underlay to upload it.

I decided it was taking too much mental energy thinking about whether
to convert to 2.6 from 2.0, and I should just decide to do it or not
do it.

So I picked two pieces, one vocal, and the other a dance, both
unbarred parts.

The dance piece converts without problems, but looks close to
identical in both versions. You can see if you agree, but I don’t see
any compelling reason to do a lot of work to go from this
to
this.

For the vocal piece, using abc2ly directly on the ABC works pretty
well, except that some of the lilypond snippets I have in %%ly
directives in the ABC need to be changed. However, I immediately
found a major problem with printing a second verse if you use
convert-ly on the lily 2.0 abc2ly output. So it isn’t really an
option to just switch to 2.6 and convert the previous pieces in a
large book. When I reported this as a bug, I was told something close
to that convert-ly doesn’t convert lyrics between 2.0 and 2.6.
(Actual email from Eric Sandberg: addlyrics (2.0) is converted to oldaddlyrics, which is strongly deprecated,
and pretty unsupported. It is known that it sometimes doesn’t work.

There is no good automated way to convert from oldaddlyrics to lyricsto, so
I’m afraid you’ll have to fix it manually.)

The thread has continued; see the
mailing list archives for further discussion.

This suggests that the Dowlands and Morleys are probably never
going to make it to 2.6. Maybe the next big project. But it does
mean that I have to keep a 2.0 environment working.

So I would say that the only obvious advantage to me of 2.6 over
2.0 is the unicode support, which is only important if I do more
Polish music, which I don’t really have any plans for. The default
font for printing lyrics has changed, and I suppose I could get used
to it, but I can’t say it bowls me over with its elegance. You can
see the difference if you look at
the
2.0 output
and
the
2.6 output.

There have been major changes to the underlying technology between 2.0
and 2.6. TeX is no longer the underlying layout engine, and lily is
producing its own postscript. So given this, it’s actually pretty
amazing that more things haven’t broken. But since I have TeX
installed and working well on my system, that isn’t really a reason
for me to change. Previously I’ve been motivated to do all the work
that converting both the lilypond source and the scripts that produce
the lilypond source by the promise of better looking music at the end
of the tunnel, but I don’t see that I have that in this case.

So until someone shows me a compelling reason to do otherwise, the
Serpent
Publications production environment is going to remain on 2.0.

I do have a script that allows me to test the current CVS version
of lilypond. When I’m feeling virtuous about contributing to open
source software, I will continue to smoketest the abc2ly and
convert-ly scripts to make sure they aren’t obviously broken. And
maybe this will show me that there are benefits to some future version
of lilypond that justify the conversion pain.

The new Dowland,
Where
Sinne sore wounding,
is the original key. We tried it both a third
down
and a fourth
down, since in the original key the cantus part goes up to high a,
which is clearly unsuitable for our group.

Several people brought up notation issues:

• At her fringe
  concert on Wednesday morning, Judith
  Conrad spoke of the difficulty in playing 17th and 18th century
  keyboard music from modern editions for organ on a clavichord without
  pedals. The facsimiles apparently are printed on two staves like
  modern piano music, and may or may not have an indication of which
  voices to play on the pedals. The modern editions for organists
  insist on putting the voices they play on the pedals of a modern organ
  onto a third staff, which may make it some easier for someone playing
  an organ with pedals, but makes it harder for anyone playing an
  instrument without them.
• At the same concert, Dr. Stuart
  Frankel gave it as his opinion that people had not in fact played
  from keyboard tablature, but used it as a convenient shorthand for
  notating ideas arrived at at the keyboard. He based this on his
  observation that the existing keyboard music from the 18th century
  which is in staff notation has drips of candle wax and spilled liquids
  on it, but surviving tablature is comparatively pristine.
• At her masterclass, Ellen
  Hargis discussed the problem of singers’ deciding where to breath in
  long florid passages. She believed that the regular beaming of notes
  in modern editions makes the problem harder, as the beams obscure the
  shape of the melody, and she urged people doing their own editions to
  avoid beaming which doesn’t occur in the original editions.
• I wasn’t there, but several people told me that John Tyson at his workshop and
  concert, plugged this site
  as one of the best sources of Renaissance music in existence based on
  the provision of unbarred parts and original beamings in legible,
  modern clefs.

I don’t remember this much discussion of notation at previous
BEMF’s. So maybe what I’m doing is really on the cutting edge and
everybody will be doing it that way any minute now.

There’s really a lot to be said for being able to play lots of dances
together without page turns. And to do that, you need parts rather
than scores. And the Cantabile Renaissance
Band has some members who’d like to play more dance music. So I
might be doing more of both the Gervaise and the Susato in partbook
format.

This week’s been a busy performing week, so only the new Dowland.

When the
poore Criple by the poole did lye,
completes the three-part song that also includes
Thou
Mighty God

and When
David’s life by Saul was often sought
.

All three pieces are both rhythmically and harmonically
challenging. If you’re having trouble reading them, try getting
bassus and cantus solid before adding the altus and (especially) the
tenor.

• 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).