Re: stylesheets, defaults, and other in-Pond-erables

[David Rogers]

Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello all,
>
>> I'm hoping to break out a series of stylesheets (or stylesheet sets):
>>     instrument (e.g., violin) solo
>>     piano solo
>>     piano + vocal
>>     piano + solo instrument
>>     organ solo
>>     instrumental ensemble (e.g., piano quartet)
>>     chorus a cappella
>>     orchestra
>>     orchestra + chorus
>
> I've found lovely examples of piano + vocal, organ solo, chorus +
> piano reduction, orchestra, and orchestra + chorus in my
> library. (Most are Bärenreiter, so I'm sticking close to Lilypond's
> inspirational roots…)
>
> So now I really need a benchmark for instrument solo, piano solo,
> piano + solo instrument, instrumental ensemble, and chorus a
> cappella. (I have some scores in my library, of course, but none of
> them are stunning enough to consider using as a benchmark.)


Still not quite understanding the request...

The bits of Boulez's third piano sonata published by Universal are
certainly an engraver's tour de force; long passages of grace notes with
a new dynamic mark for each individual note, acrobatically-drawn slurs
snaking across staves, two types of pedal at once, multiple layers of
markup (both text and symbol), vertically-typeset names for snippets of
music, tiny crescendo marks drawn at angles between individual notes,
finicky pedal markings - oh well, you get the point. A sample is
included in a UE compilation published 1968 called "Styles in 20th
Century Piano Music" (along with other music, all well-engraved, but IMO
Universal is almost never as pretty as Baerenreiter.)

If you want to make use of this blue book and don't find a copy
easily, just send me your postal address and I'll mail it to you. Or
email you a page or two scanned, if that's acceptable practice.

If instead the request is more like "What's the over-all look of the
canonical example of a plain piano solo score", I think you're unlikely
to go wrong with Henle's print of the Beethoven sonatas done in the
1950s. The problem, though, is that there are so many possible ways to
"mess up" a piano score by adding special markings and such, and
Beethoven didn't live long enough to make use of them all. :)

I don't think "stunning" is always good. Being stunned sometimes comes
from obtrusive shapes that call too much attention to themselves.

I think a big part of "getting piano music right" in Lilypond is ability
to know when to use chords, when to use separate voices, and when to use
polyphony, and having convenient and logical means for switching
midstream.


I'm sure that some of my favourable impressions of some of the
nicest-looking scores come from generally-non-varying items such as
notehead shape, markup font, proportion of notehead size to staff size,
proportion of staff size to paper size, and so on. Also the
hand-engraver's ability to identify visually and logically "what goes
with what" and make subtle improvements to the inter-note spacing.

-- 
David R