Dear all,
As promised, here are a few ideas on what would seem to me as a possible
development of Gregorio, now that a 2.3 bugfix version has been
released. Recently, Mr Domblides contacted me about the possible
integration of ancient neumatic notation (St Galle and Laon), it looks
like a very useful and promising project, which raised a good motivation
in some of you (and me too!). I cc. here Mr Gatte, who is the maintainer
of the impressive and very useful websites
Let me put this in another perspective.
The whole proposition might be interesting in itself, but maybe there
are other users of Gregorio around like me.
I'm using Gregorio as a tool to provide scores for our singers, scores
that are not so easy to find.
Example: in all of the books I have, psalms only give a full notation of
the first verse, and on the following ones, the flexes are notated by
signs. So I write these psalms out in complete scores.
I'm less (or not at all) interested in making a score a subject for a
"historical study", so making a plain score as Gregorio did up to now (I
used 2.0 up to now on Linux), should not be made more intricate by this
new development.
One of our singers has some time ago searched for neumatic notation of a
certain piece (Introitus of the 4th Advent sunday if I remember well),
and he came up with 12 (twelve!!!!) different versions. Often
differences were not very numerous, but there were no two equal. So I
keep wondering on what grounds one version would be chosen above another.
But that is a side remark. My main worry is: please make sure things
don't get more complicated for very ordinary users. I have quite some
experience in using computers of different types (and in certain
programming areas), and in the past this has been all too often been
overlooked.:-[
Herman Viaene
-http://gregorian-chant.ning.com
-
www.gregofacsimil.net/03-MANUSCRITS/INTERNET-ET-LES-MANUSCRITS/manuscrits_internet.html
I know Sr Maria Ruth, in Italy, is also interested, among all for
Hildegard von Bingen manuscripts, and Fr Peron has also facsimiles that
could be handy. Mr Domblides has more ideas of people to invite, but
beforehand I think it would be useful discuss it here...
I have never moderated an online brainstorming, but let's try it now.
The questions I'm asking you are the following:
- would that be useful to you?
- for what purpose? (please develop a little here)
- how exactly would you wish the output of ancient notation in
Gregorio to be?
- what kind of notation would you use?
- would you be ready to help?
- would you have time this month for this?
- do you have ideas on how the user would input old neumes? (this is
one of the biggest challenges)
- do you have the ability of designing a font? (another challenge!)
- do you have personal resources, like scans of manuscripts, that you
could share?
- how do you think we should proceed?
My vision would be to engage discussions and start to have a few more
precise ideas, and then to contact more people to continue the
discussion on more solid bases and eventually ask for help. I personally
don't know ancient notation very well (in fact I almost don't know it),
I'm currently documenting further to see the difficulty of the design.
Here is my vision:
- the first step (I'd say it's 60% of the work) is to make a precise
document, describing the project (why, who, how, etc.), and the basis of
ancient notation, with:
* first a list of the different neumes, as exhaustive as possible
* the way the neumes will be inputted by the user in gabc
* how it will look like in Gregorio
- the second step, once this document is done and agreed on, is to
implement it, by:
* designing the font(s?), based on the list of neumes
* implementing the extension to the gabc syntax
* implementing the TeX output
About the method, I think it should be a (not too big) group of
interested people, working together on the same document, cooperating
and communicating fast. I can lead this group, but I will definitely
need people knowing the topic quite well in order to be able to
understand it and do something good!
Tell what you think about all this!
I will have time until July 15th, then after September 1st, but not much
inbetween; if we have a precise document by September, I'll start
implementing at this period, this is not the part that frightens me most!
Thank you,
--
Elie
--
Veel mensen danken hun goed geweten aan hun slecht geheugen. (G. Bomans)
Lots of people owe their good conscience to their bad memory (G. Bomans)
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