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 <owendl...@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
