Re: Gregorian Chant

[Richard Shann]

On Fri, 2023-04-28 at 18:10 +0100, Joe Wilkinson wrote:
>  Hi Richard,
>  This is pure curiosity but we have been sent this as a possible
> Church Chant for the Coronation and I wondered how/if it could be put
> into denemo.

Well, I put the Gregorian chant stuff into Denemo, but I confess I had
a struggle to find it - the Command Center didn't help :( It seems it's
all tucked away in a palette. I see a small amount of support for chant
in the Display - just placing the clefs and reducing to a four line
staff; I expect that's as far as that goes - the display is not going
to show what Gregorian Chant looks like even with customising note
heads etc. What it's there for, of course, is to control LilyPond's
output. I've long since (60 years) forgotten  the terminology for all
the ways notes are joined, run into little diamond shaped patterns etc,
but I can see a set of buttons that will be intended to do that
(episum, flexa, ictus ...) but fiddling around with them just now I
couldn't get them to do much.(*) It could be that LilyPond syntax has
moved on since this was written, but more likely it's a matter of
knowing what each bit of syntax means and putting it in the right
place. The LilyPond documentation is your only resource for that...




>  We are not going to use it, so there is no urgency!!! This is purely
> out of curiosity since I imagined I might be able to input the notes
> on a chant staff and then convert to something that looked like real
> music (rather than doing it in my head.
>  
>  I can get up the Vaticana Clef with 4 lines and put in notes but
> they are rounded.
>  And I cannot see how one can put in the rising slurs on, say salvam.
> Or rather I can, adding a melsimata at the end of a syllable but not
> with slurs. Equally falling slurs.

The slur command is generating the standard LilyPond syntax for a slur,
LilyPond doesn't use this in Gregorian Chant - there is a list of the
things you can use at

https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.25/Documentation/notation/gregorian-square-neume-ligatures

some of which will be in the palette already, no doubt, but others you
would need to add. 

good luck!

Richard
(*) ok, you piqued my curiosity - it seems what you do is to click the
\[ before the first of the notes and the \] after the second and then
put a pes on the first note and that links them together... So if you
were working a lot in gregorian chant you would commandeer the slur
commands to insert the \[ \] syntax instead of the ( ) syntax which
they normally do...

>  The edit window shows the syllables moving with slurs, but the
> Typeset and Playback windows ignore them. Melismatas do work with the
> syllables but it is not clear which notes are for which syllable. See
> below.
>  
>  Best wishes
>  Joe
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