Category: Publishing

The next Dowland is Thou
Mighty God
. It’s actually the first verse of a three-verse through-composed
song. But it was more than the Cantabile Renaissance Band could actually chew on in one meeting,
so we’ll be continuing to work on it over the next two weeks along
with the next parts.

It was also a good morning’s work figuring out how to translate the
17th century notation into what we’re used to. It’s a good
demonstration of how differently Dowland’s musicians thought about
things like fermatas and repeat signs than we do.

After the A section, the facsimile has a double bar in all
parts. It took me quite a while to twig to the fact that that double
bar is a full stop — all the parts have different length notes before
the double bar, but although by modern counting some of them cross the
bar, that isn’t the way Dowland sang it.

Instead of a modern repeat sign, which means, “At the end-repeat,
go back to the begin-repeat”, Dowland used a relative of the segno.
He seems to have thought of it something like, “This second segno is
the corresponding place to the first segno.” So instead of writing out
first and second endings, he writes a second beginning at the
end of the repeated section, and inserts the first segno where the
repeated section starts being the same as the first time through.
This means that the segno marks are frequently in different places in
different parts.

In the case of this piece, Cantus, Altus, and Bassus all repeat
quite straightforwardly, but the Tenor finishes the phrase before the
repeat sign after all the other parts have started the new phrase.
But on the repeat, Dowland wrote music for that part that went with
the phrase after the repeat. So the tenor part has a long “second
beginning”. Rather than inflict a long “first ending” on everybody
for the sake of the tenor’s “second beginning”, I have taken the
liberty of unfolding the Tenor repeat, and inserting double bars in
the Tenor part where the repeat signs are in the other parts. In
rehearsal last night, it was confusing, but not obviously more so than
any other decision I might have made.

Anthony
Holborne wrote very polyphonic dance music. I’ve just put 5
pieces up. They’re a lot of fun — if it’s too complicated for your
group to sight read all at once, read two lines together.

The next Dowland is If that a
sinner’s sighs be angel’s food. It’s a little easier than the
last one, althought the inner parts are still pretty wild and crazy.
I sang Altus when we read it first, and then switched to Bassus on
serpent, and the Bassus is a lot easier. Our group finds it more
comfortable down a
third.

I’ve also added an English singing translation to Vive la
Serpe by Sermisy.

Dowland’s
“In this trembling, trembling shadow” is the next piece in “A
Pilgrim’s Solace”. We did it at the Cantabile Renaissance
Band last night and it was wild and wonderful both rhythmically
and harmonically.

Fantasia
25 and Fantasia
26 are from the Phalese “Bicinia”, which I’m gradually going
through. I wouldn’t have gotten to these two for a while yet, but
John Tyson wants to play them at a Memorial Day workshop with Matthias
Maute, so I did them as a favor to him. I don’t have a duet partner
at the moment, so these are untested unless John’s gotten around to
playing them. So as always, let me know if there are problems.

I spent most of yesterday morning building and testing lilypond
4.5.

I won’t be using it routinely yet, because there’s a very serious
bug in abc2ly, where it doesn’t any more translate the Key signature.

Update: they fixed that but, so I’ll probably be doing some more
testing, and then maybe starting to convert my setup to using the
current version.

This means abc2ly is unusable, since the notes are different for a
different key signature in lilypond and abc. That is, in lilypond an
F# is entered as fis no matter what the key signature is. But in ABC,
the note on the first space of a treble clef is entered as F, and the
key signature is what determines whether that note is sharped or not.
So an abc2ly that doesn’t know what the key signature is, isn’t going
to have the right notes, and a workaround that just edits the key
signature in isn’t.

But just so you can see what they’re up to, compare this piece

from 2.0.2 with the same piece from
2.5.19

Let me know what you think.

Latest upload to the music publishing:
Susanne
un jour, Lassus

This is not specifically for the Cantabile Renaissance
Band, unlike most of my polyphonic Renaissance music.

It was supposed to be for the Cambridge Center for Adult Education
Renaissance Ensemble class. I will still use it for whatever part I
end up doing, and I suspect most of the singers will use it, but the
instructor is still convinced that unbarred parts are a harder way to
play Renaissance music, and is planning to distribute hand-written
parts. She has degrees in music from prestigious institutions, so her
education does include how to write legible notes, and her normal
handwriting is no worse than most peoples, but when she reduces lyrics
to “fit” under notes, they come out completely illegible.

Anyway, she decided that, or told me about the decision, after I
had already done more than half the transcription, so I finished it.
I’m going to be not only singing or playing some part in the madrigal,
but doing divisions on the top line. So I’ll be able to play the
divisions against the MIDI file instead of just a metronome, which is
an advantage when things get wild and crazy.

See Ancor che
col partire for something else I did this way. I also did “Non
Gemme non fin aura”, but haven’t yet uploaded it; watch this space for
further developments.

The transcription is from the Choral
Public Domain Library edition. Unfortunately this contributor
uploaded the .mus finale file, which I can’t read. Had they uploaded
the .etf file, lilypond would
have been able to use it. The MIDI file is also useless for
transcription purposes, as all the
parts are on the same channel.

I’m working on this piece to play at the
Dan Laurin Masterclass. There are a couple of ways in which existing
editions of van Eyck don’t completely meet the needs of performing
recorder players:

• The pieces are theme and variations on popular tunes of the day,
  which van Eyck and his audience undoubtedly thought of with the
  words. The good editions include the words in endnotes, but don’t
  underlay them for the performer.
• Several famous recorder players have told me that the way to
  practice the fancy variations is in conjunction with the simpler
  ones. That is, you play a phrase of the original tune, then the same
  phrase in the variation you’re working on. This is easy with the
  first phrase, but I end up with all kinds of markings on my music for
  finding the beginnings of the subsequent phrases easily in the
  variations.
• Less important and maybe not important at all: printed music from the
  seventeenth century did not beam the notes. This makes the van Eyck
  facsimile all but impossible to play from, as telling the eight notes
  from the sixteenth notes is really difficult at playing speed. It
  isn’t clear that it’s really that inauthentic to play from editions
  with beamed notes — hand-written music from that era did beam notes,
  so it was probably the printing technology that made it necessary to
  not beam anything. However, in eighteenth century facsimiles, where
  there are beamed notes, the beaming is much less regular than in more
  modern printing, and is used as an editorial grouping, not a
  completely regular indication of the beats. So it isn’t clear that
  the beams in a modern edition necessarily would be the ones that van
  Eyck or one of his scribes would have written.

So as a music publisher, I am experimenting with whether there are
better ways to present the music for a performer to work on. I have
three versions of this piece on the web:

• number
  290, which is unbeamed but has the tune underlaid with the words.

• Number
  291, which is unbeamed, with the words underlaid, and the 4
  versions arranged as a “score”, so that it’s clear what notes in the
  variations correspond with what place in the tune and with each
  other. This one unfortunately went to three pages,
  so you might want to look at
  the beginnings of the book
  instead.

• Number
  292, which is like 291, but with the notes beamed.

So if you’re a recorder player who enjoys van Eyck, try these, and let
me know what you think.

Words

The words to this one presented an editorial challenge. The Amadeus
edition that I play from has the French words in the back, and a
translation into German, but notes that the tune van Eyck used is
different from the French tune that goes with those words.

“The
Book”, Jacob
van Eyck’s Der fluyten lust-hof: (1644-c1655) (Muziekhistorische
monografieën) by Ruth van Baak Griffioen, has a facsimile of the
tune van Eyck used with the Dutch words, but doesn’t translate them.

The French words work pretty well for the B section, but have far
too many syllables for the A section.

If I manage to get a copy and even vaguely sensible translation of
the Dutch words, and find that they’re significantly different from
the French ones, I may decide to use them instead. For now, I have
abbreviated the French A section, and have underlaid it.

Update, March 26: One surprising thing you see when you print the
variations out in score format is that the last one ends with a
flourish that makes it a measure longer than the others. This means I
had to tell lilypond that the barlines were a property of the staff rather
than the score. This meant that in the first scores I published, the
barlines disappeared, since you have to use a different command to get
a staff barline than a score barline. Since I usually publish barless
music, I didn’t even notice until someone called it to my attention.
It’s fixed now.

I bought the Broude Brothers’ facsimile 2 years ago at the Boston
Early Music Festival, but haven’t done much with it. I’m playing some
with John Tyson at my lessons now, and thought it would be fun to try
them with the Cantabile Renaissance Band.
The one I started with is the Josquin “Adieu
mes amours”, which we also have as a
double canon by Jean Mouton.

(There is one piece from the Odhecaton, ‘James, James’, on the site, but I used
that as a test piece to see if I could get notation out of Alain
Naigeon’s MIDI file. I think I ended up just entering the ABC; I
might be able to deal with the MIDI file now.

The original is a beautiful book — the lilypond output looks really
clunky compared to what Petrucci did. I’ve tried to mimic the
Petrucci layout by using landscape, and putting the cantus and tenor
on the verso page and the altus and bassus on the recto.

This is one of the first books of printed music ever, and it didn’t
underlay the words to many of the songs. Nobody quite knows whether
they just used instruments, or the singers sang la, la or solfege
syllables, or whether they got the words from somewhere else. In this
case, I got the words off the internet. I intended to just underlay
the Tenor part, which is just the unornamented tune, but the Bassus
part was also pretty undecorated, so I did that too. So as the
arrangement stands now, you could do it with male voices and recorder
obligato. It could be that I’ll decide to underlay the Cantus and
Altus later.

Heurteur, Grace et vertu

My oversimplification of the alternative endings was too simplified to
be playable, so I have unsimplified it but not to the extent the AR
edition does.

Also, there was a typo in the words, which has been fixed.

Barney is convinced there should be an indication of the elision,
but I don’t do that anywhere else. But I have asked the Lilypond user
list whether it’s possible.

Update: 02/10/05
I wrote the lilypond
user list with the question
about how to do this, and didn’t get anything useful back.

There was a dotted rest in the cantus part, which I transcribed
from the AR edition, but my typesetting standards don’t allow dotted
rests, so I have taken it out.

Campian, Babylon Streams

There was an underlay problem in verse 5, which is now fixed.

If
one were really going to sing all 9 verses, one would want to do
something like italicize the even numbered ones.

Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno

The lyrics were missing lots of hyphens. I forget where I got that
from — I probably didn’t enter the lyrics directly. Fixed now. Let
me know if I overdid it. I’m pretty sure “sconsolato” is one word,
but I suppose it could be “scon solato”.

The Cantabile
Renaissance band has been doing more Thomas
Campian lately, and we also have a set of songs that have
something to do with rivers, because we play every year for the Walk for Hunger on the banks
of the Charles River.

There’s a piece called Babylon Streams by Thomas Campian that the West Gallery Quire does.
It was published in the Scottish Psalter in 1615 with words from the
New
Version of the Metrical psalms. But Bruce Randall usually uses
the words from Walter Scott’s Dies Irae translation, which are very
impressive.

But I thought it would be fun to sing to the Babylon words along
with the Billings
Lamentation over Boston and the Psaume
CXXXVII by Paschal de l’Estocart.

So it’s up.

Neither of these are new typesetting, but I noticed they weren’t there
when I was writing up Babylon
Streams, so I added them.

We thought Campian’s
My love hath vowed he will forsake me might work in the May songs
group we do at the Walk for Hunger, so I set
that.

And we did Psaume CXXXVII
by Paschal de l’Estocart to a translation by Clement Marot last
year at the Walk, and it was a big hit. The Serpent especially
likes it.