Re: laying out plainsong chant

[Gabe Moothart]

Joram,

My wife the expert refers to the "longbar" as the chanting tone. This particular notation is from The Plainsong Psalter (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0898691621), though I assume it is used in other places as well.

You're basically right about what it means, but an example is here (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84432/psalm_example.png). The chant tone usually starts a line and is used for all the syllables until near the end. Ticks and slashes in the text correspond to the ticks and slashes under the music.

For example the third line in verse 1 would be sung to the (second) chant tone up until the slash, then at "of" the note drops and follows the music to the end of the line.

Gabe

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Noeck <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Gabe,

cool, nice to hear. I will give it a try myself. What do those notes
actually mean? An undefined number of notes (according to the text) with
this given pitch?

I still think there should be some Lilypond built-in functionality for
that, because I do not like the misuse of rests for that. Perhaps, there
will be some time in half a year from now when I could look into this
further. For now, this seems to solve the question reasonably well
concerning the printed output.

Just to note my thoughts about the functionality I’m thinking of publicly:
- a staff context for that purpose (without stems, timing, slurs
unaffected by non-existing stems, nice size of parentizeItems)
- a markup command that formats nicely the needed characters:
  ´ / * - …
- a longbar command that follows a note:
  a4\longbar
  What would be a good name? \repeated? \multinote?
    - midi output should be possible, therefore one should be able to
specify the number of repetitions
    - a4*6\longbar if the syntax can cope with that or
    - a4\longbar 6 if that would be possible (not sure either)
- alternatively: another repeat-type, = unfold in midi but like \longbar
in print
    - naming suggestion: \repeat psalm (Better ideas?)
    - perhaps a better idea than the first one
- Does the font have a symbol for it? Should be defined otherwise.

Cheers,
Joram