There no ligatures in Kievan notation (was Re: Kievan hatchet notes for lilypond?)
On Thursday 30 November 2006 06:01, you wrote: Hello, Panteleimon! Hello, thank you for your response I fear the task of fully implementing kievan chant notation is more than just a question of adding thirteen glyphs. recognize at least pes ligatures (those pairwise stacked rhombic glyphs) and clivis ligatures (e.g. the third glyph in the last line of the long example). Actually, those are not ligatures, and there are no ligatures at all in Kievan notation. The two stacked diamond-shapes you refer to are simply a half note. They refer to the space inbetween the two diamonds, in this case mi or b-natural. If the diamonds where in spaces, they would refer to the line in-between. The squiggly-with-stem and double-diamond-with-stem notes that also seem to take up several spaces are not ligatures either, just 16th notes. (By the way, the durations I cite are doubled by some transcribers in order to have a whole-note as the longest duration, but this gives an incorrect impression of the flow of the chant). To me, the notation looks structurally quite similar to gothic (also called hufnagel) chant notation, though the glyphs are somewhat different. I would be interested to know what notation looked like in Poland in the 1600's, to see if it has a parent for this style Still, adding those glyphs that are not part of ligatures (sole note heads, clefs, custos, accidentals, etc.) would be a good starting point (any volunteers?). As I understand it, the only things necessary *besides* adding the glyphs would be: 1. Spacing according text syllable. This is the only way notes are spaced in this chant, as you can see. There is a small even block of space between each textual syllable, all the notes whereof are equidistant and very close. %%%(This is part of what makes this notation better for Znamenny Chant, being closer in this regard to the neumatic origins and taking up less space for long, involved melismata. It looks ugly if you try to do it with round notes.)%%% My hope is that this can be accomplished simply making slurs invisible in the kievan-init.ly file | Slur #'transparent = ##t | and then convincing lilypond to put an appropriate block of space between syllables. At first I thought that this could be done with LyricSpace #'minimum-distance , but that would only work for short syllables. 2. Right now we can set shaped noteheads in LP like this: \set shapeNoteStyles = ##(fa # la fa # la mi) (or something like that). We'd have to do something similar but different in the init.ly for kievan, since several symbols (the quarter and the eight) have slightly different forms for lines and spaces. These differences are very important to the overall look of the music. Note that they differ not to according scale-position (like shapenotes) but according to whether they are on a line or space. That means that g,8 looks different from g8 Furthermore, the eigth note (block with long tail) has not two but *four* slightly different forms: two for stem-up and two for stem-down. I think that rest could be done just by thickening lines and such, except perhaps that the beams on the 16th notes (single beams) extend beyond the note-stems and half sort of blunt edges, but I'm sure that can be done without designing anything new, right? Thanks again for your response. I look forward to doing whatever I can to implement this feature. Sincerely, Monk Panteleimon Hermitage of the Holy Cross Wayne, WV USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.holycross-hermitage.com/ http://www.holycrosskliros.org/ PS. I have an adaption of a long chant like this example in which the sequence of notes is almost exactly as in the Slavonic original. I can post both if you like, so you how can see how simple it really is. Greetings, Juergen On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Monk Panteleimon wrote: Hello, developers of Lilypond. I submitted to the lilypond-user list a queru regarding the possibilty of adding symbols for kievan chant notation to lilyponds feta font. I got no response, but thought I'd try the developers, specifically those involved with older notations. I have counted thirteen symbols that would need adding to lilypond's font (presumably as noteheads, with their stems included, two dots and one clef) in order to enable lilypond to imitate the Chant-books of the Russian Orthodox Church. I have no idea how to make such characters, or how to fit them into lilypond, so I'm asking this to be added as a sponsored feature. Being a monk I have no personal money, but if the lilypond-developers can give me an estimated cost of sponsorship for the addition of these symbols, then I believe that I may be able find several people interested enough to support the feature, even if they are not already lilypond-users. I am thinking of some Russian Chant enthusiasts and people already developing ways to digitally reproduce Russian Liturgical books. I have
Re: There no ligatures in Kievan notation (was Re: Kievan hatchet notes for lilypond?)
On Thu, 30 Nov 2006, Monk Panteleimon wrote: On Thursday 30 November 2006 06:01, you wrote: Hello, Panteleimon! Hello, thank you for your response I fear the task of fully implementing kievan chant notation is more than just a question of adding thirteen glyphs. recognize at least pes ligatures (those pairwise stacked rhombic glyphs) and clivis ligatures (e.g. the third glyph in the last line of the long example). Actually, those are not ligatures, and there are no ligatures at all in Kievan notation. The two stacked diamond-shapes you refer to are simply a half note. They refer to the space inbetween the two diamonds, in this case mi or b-natural. If the diamonds where in spaces, they would refer to the line in-between. The squiggly-with-stem and double-diamond-with-stem notes that also seem to take up several spaces are not ligatures either, just 16th notes. (By the way, the durations I cite are doubled by some transcribers in order to have a whole-note as the longest duration, but this gives an incorrect impression of the flow of the chant). Ok, I understand. This, of course, simplifies things a lot. Then the main task really should be to incorporate these glyphs into lily. Though I unfortunately have to confess that I currently have no time at all to care for it (I am currently working hard on a thesis, and my remaining time is running out soon). Maybe Han-Wen/Jan would do it as a sponsored feature? I am not sure what is the latest state of incorporating new glyphs into lily; so far, we used to have to design glyphs by manually writing Metafont code, which may result in high-quality glyphs, but is also an extremely time-consuming process. But nowadays, lily supports a couple of font formats. Maybe there is a simpler way of getting font characters into lily, e.g. by scanning + tracing them? Han-Wen, Werner, what do you think? In any case, I guess you would at least need to have high-resolution scans of hand-writings or printings (which should be sufficiently old in order to not violate copyright laws). To me, the notation looks structurally quite similar to gothic (also called hufnagel) chant notation, though the glyphs are somewhat different. I would be interested to know what notation looked like in Poland in the 1600's, to see if it has a parent for this style Unfortunately, I am not familiar with Polish ancient notation. Still, since (at least the northern and western part of) Poland is mostly Catholic rather than Orthodox, I strongly guess that they used gothic and Roman (i.e. square) neumes, as well as mensural notation. I suspect, however, that it may be different for those parts of Poland near to the Ukrainian or Russsian border. As I understand it, the only things necessary *besides* adding the glyphs would be: 1. Spacing according text syllable. This is the only way notes are spaced in this chant, as you can see. There is a small even block of space between each textual syllable, all the notes whereof are equidistant and very close. %%%(This is part of what makes this notation better for Znamenny Chant, being closer in this regard to the neumatic origins and taking up less space for long, involved melismata. It looks ugly if you try to do it with round notes.)%%% My hope is that this can be accomplished simply making slurs invisible in the kievan-init.ly file | Slur #'transparent = ##t | and then convincing lilypond to put an appropriate block of space between syllables. At first I thought that this could be done with LyricSpace #'minimum-distance , but that would only work for short syllables. Right. There are a tricks that will force lily to typeset notes rather densely, thus resulting in almost what you probably would like to get. Still, I do not know how you could achieve strictly equidistantly and densely spaced noteheads within melismas. 2. Right now we can set shaped noteheads in LP like this: \set shapeNoteStyles = ##(fa # la fa # la mi) (or something like that). We'd have to do something similar but different in the init.ly for kievan, since several symbols (the quarter and the eight) have slightly different forms for lines and spaces. These differences are very important to the overall look of the music. Note that they differ not to according scale-position (like shapenotes) but according to whether they are on a line or space. That means that g,8 looks different from g8 There is currently support for line/space glyph distinction for custodes and mensural flags in the c++ backend. It should not be too hard to also add it for noteheads, but I guess Han-Wen will not be too happy to add new program logic to the c++ backend. Hence I guess, for the long term, this cries for migrating the whole logic to scheme. Furthermore, the eigth note (block with long tail) has not two but *four* slightly different forms: two for stem-up and two for stem-down. Just like with the custos glyphs, I guess. I think that
