Re: SMuFL name mapping update, 17 December

[Jürgen Reuter]

   Hi Owen,

   first of all, thank you very much for all of your great work and
   patience with those structures grown sometimes wildly over many years!
    Here are my comments regarding the mapping specifically for ancient
   notation glyphs.

   noteheads.uM2, noteheads.dM2

   IIRC, I have seen these noteheads various times in print (which does
   not necessarily mean that they are an agreed standard), though I can
   not immediately find an example to show.  If I remember correctly, e.g.
   publisher "Möseler Verlag" once published the work "Geborn ist uns
   Immanuel" from Michael Praetorius in its "Lose Blätter" collection with
   exactly these noteheads.  I think the idea of these noteheads is that
   their shape was derived from mensural longa, representing the value of
   4 whole notes in transcription to modern notation, but typographically
   they are used with stem up or down just like modern quarter notes.
   However, just because a single publisher uses these notes this way does
   not necessarily imply that this is widely accepted practice.
   I agree that the stem should be drawn by the C++ code, just like for
   quarter notes, rather than incorporating it into the font.  However, I
   guess, since these notes are used extremely seldom, it was not
   considered worth or desirable to make the rather complex C++ stem
   drawing code even more complex only for adding these exotic noteheads,
   but go the much simpler way to add separate glyphs (i.e. kind of dirty
   hack to save much trouble with the C++ code, at least back then...).

   scripts.lcomma

   No, this is not primarily a chant thing.  It already existed before
   chant implementation of virgula, see commit
   8e300d9598c6f54cb18d8bc8cd0458fa1028d8b9 in the LilyPond repository.

   scripts.rvarcomma

   rvarcomma was added specifically for Gregorian Chant.  Maybe it is also
   useful in contemporary notation, but I do not actually know.

   scripts.lvarcomma

   lvarcomma was added for reasons of consistency / orthogonality with
   lcomma (e.g. think of (future) automatic transcription etc.), but I do
   not know of any specific use in Gregorian Chant.  Probably, it is
   unused.

   scripts.augmentum

   Yes, I think you are right: Probably, the first design approach was to
   consider augmentum dots as scripts (just as literature on Gregorian
   Chant does).  But when actually implementing it, it turned out that
   LilyPond's engraver for dotted notes does typographically the correct
   thing (even if the dot of a dotted note has slightly different musical
   meaning compared to the vaticana dot).

   noteheads.smedicaea.rvirga, noteheads.smedicaea.virga

   This is still somewhat in the state "work in progress" (forever?).
   Have a look at:
   https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:IN.Nos.autem.gloriari.Editio.Medica
   ea.1890.Pustet.png
   Medicaea has somewhat different engraving rules than Vaticana.  As of
   now, there is no MedicaeaLigatureEngraver.  When having implemented
   such an engraver, probably there will be no more need for a virga and
   rvirga, but this is actually not for sure as of now.  Maybe we should
   get rid of these glyphs, but then people will not even be able to
   typeset something similar as the Medicaea ligature engraver would do.
   However, my guess is that there is not anyone trying to actually
   typeset Medicaea with LilyPond.

   clefs.hufnagel.do.fa

   Yes, from the perspective of the code, this is basically a "do" clef,
   but with additional indication of the "fa" pitch.  Musicologically, one
   could also view this clef as a "fa" clef, but with additional
   indication of the "do" pitch.  So, musicologically, I think "do/fa
   clef" correctly describes this clef, but from an implementation point
   of view, it is actually a variant of the "do clef" (but also could have
   been implemented as a variation of the "fa clef").

   noteheads.shufnagel.virga

   First of all, a comment about nomenclature: "Hufnagel" (English:
   something similar to "horse shoe") is the standard term used in German
   scientific papers.  It is an allusion to the shape of the noteheads
   (plus stem).  In English literature, often the term "Gothic" is used as
   well.  In fact, Hufnagel notation developed during the Gothic period.
   Hence, one may consider to replace "Hufnagel" with "Gothic" (but if we
   did this, it should be done consistently).
   And no, this glyph is definitely not Vaticana.  Vaticana is Roman style
   of notation (with square-shaped noteheads), while Hufnagel is Gothic
   style of notation (with rhombic-shaped noteheads).  Similar to the
   VaticanaLigatureEngraver, a HufnagelLigatureEngraver (or
   GothicLigatureEngraver) was planned, but never implemented.  Similar to
   noteheads.smedicaea.rvirga and noteheads.smedicaea.virga, it was
   expected that this engraver would have to make use of this glyph.

   See e.g. here for a table of Gothic neumes:
   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:07-gothic-table.jpg

   Or e.g. here for a full example:
   https://pictures.abebooks.com/inventory/30721812531.jpg

   The overall taxonomy is roughly a tree like this one:

   notation
       modern / contemporary notation
           ....
       ancient notation
           mensural notation
               white mensural notation
                   ....
               black mensural notation
                   Franconian notation
                   Italian notation
                   mannered notation
                   ....
               ....
           Gregorian notation
               astematic Gregorian notation
                   Laon-style notation
                   St. Gallen-style notation
                   Einsiedeln-style notation
                   ...
               diastematic Gregorian notation
                   Roman notation
                       Vaticana-style notation
                       Medicaea-style notation
                       ...
                   Gothic notation
                       Hufnagel-style notation
                       ... (?)

   While Hufnagel-style notation looks typographically quite different
   from Vaticana-style, it musicologically maps (largely) 1:1 to
   Vaticana.  Actually, similar to Medicaea virga, it may turn out that it
   is the Gothic ligature engraver's task to attach a vertical beam to a
   Gothic punctum neume, rather than having a separate Gothic virga neume,
   but this is a TODO.  By the way, Medicaea is just another Roman style
   of notation, just like Vaticana.  Actually, it is a decayed / much
   simplified version of Vaticana (which does *not* map 1:1, since it only
   represents a subset of the original musical information).

   Bottom line: Musicologically, Gothic virga is definitely not a Vaticana
   neume (but, of course, it is a Gregorian neume).  But it may turn out
   that this glyph should be dropped altogether in favour of a Gothic
   punctum when implementing the still missing GothicLigatureEngraver.

   custodes.*

   Yes, you are right: We use a different system, where 0 = space, 1 =
   line, and 2 = anywhere.  I just double-checked: This is the way
   custodes are usually engraved in all relevant Gregorian chant examples
   that I have access to, with only a few exceptions (that look to me like
   typographical errors rather than on purpose).  The goal of this system
   obviously is that the "stem" of the custos always ends in the middle
   between to staff lines.

   In contrast, mensural notation uses clefs where the Middle/High/Highest
   or Middle/Low/Lowest system applies.  This is in particular true for
   mensural works published by Petrucci (maybe he introduced this style of
   typography?).  However, there is no such system in Gregorian chant
   notation, as far as I know.  Hence, I consider the six variants of a
   Custos in SMuFL as a bug -- at least from a Gregorian chant point of
   view; things might slightly differ for mensural notation; I would have
   to check that more carefully.

   Hope that helps & best wishes,
   Jürgen

   On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 12:39 AM Owen Lamb <owendlamb@gmail.com> wrote:

     Hi all!
     With the semester over, I found the time to get the next three glyph
     categories mapped: Vaticana, Medicaea, and Hufnagel. Second pairs of
     eyes are very welcome to catch mistakes and give suggestions,
     especially
     regarding the contentious red entries:
     [1]https://wolfgangsta.github.io/emmentaler-bravura/
     I also made one change to the Scripts section, marking
     scripts.augmentum
     as contentious. It looks like it's a dead glyph that was never
     implemented before it was superseded by dots.dotvaticana in the
     Vaticana
     section. If no one objects, I'm marking it for deletion.
     In addition, if you haven't seen it already, I've been tracking my
     progress here:
     [2]https://github.com/WolfGangsta/emmentaler-bravura/wiki/To-Do. In
     case I
     go silent, or if someone else turns out to be in a better position
     to
     get this done, anyone should be able to fork the repository and
     continue
     where I left off.
     I don't like to make promises, but I *think* I'll be able to, God
     willing, knock out the Mensural and Neomensural sections within the
     coming week. If all goes well.
     So, stay tuned!
     Owen Lamb

References

   1. https://wolfgangsta.github.io/emmentaler-bravura/
   2. https://github.com/WolfGangsta/emmentaler-bravura/wiki/To-Do