Koerber's Illuminated Hybrid Modern (Metrical) Notation

francis

I am creating a devotional booklet for our Confraternity of the Holy Face, and I am continuing to develop the tour de force of making the music beautiful and not just functional, by harkening back to tradition in illuminated manuscripts. I also wanted to create a hybrid that is beautiful that also presents metrical modern notation, and this is where it is headed. I developed my own note shapes that would fit on a four line staff and use moveable DO.

Here are a couple of examples (far from perfected)... these are still in the idea phase.

For those of you who are promoting a metrical form of GC, what is the equivalent of breve, semi-breve in Gregorian Chant notation? I was thinking of experimenting with that also.

Richard Mix

In GABC the forms borrowed from Gregorian chant for long, breve & semi breve are (gv) (g) (G).

francis

Hi Richard

So, which actual neumes represent those durations?

Richard Mix · 12:10AM

If I understand what you're up to:

name: ;
user-notes: ;
commentary: ;
annotation: ;
centering-scheme: english;
%fontsize: 12;
%spacing: vichi;
%font: OFLSortsMillGoudy;
%width: 4.5;
%height: 11;
%%
(c4) May(gv) the(h) most(i) (,) ho(j)ly,(iv) most(h) (,) sa(j)cred,(iv) most(H) ad(I)(,)o(J)ra(I)ble,(h)

I see though that the barline kills the hyphen, and there might not be a way to make stemmed minums.

OMagnumMysterium · 1:58AM

Francis, here is what I use. The square is long and the diamond is short (breve and semi-breve, if you want to call them that). The rectangle is a double long, and the tiny notes are grace notes, which add no time and come before the beat. The jagged comb-like thing is the qualisma, which indicates a slide or very light grace note between the two notes that it connects.

I've developed this based off of historical notation systems, combined with ideas of what would be most intuitive for someone who has never learned any notation before (whether child or adult). I'm inclined to say that in simple measured music (hymns, and especially the measured chant) measure lines are not completely necessary. The are just one more thing on the page, and often you can "feel" the measure in the music just fine without them. Polyphonic music is a different story though. I'd like to get this notation to work for polyphony etc, but I've mostly just been using it for chant. What's really lacking is a good system of rests, and how to show dotted duration (1.5 length). It just hasn't been a priority yet, but maybe soon.

Here are the examples:

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