Chants for EF Requiem Mass & Burial Service
  • Arthur Connick
    Posts: 494
    I've posted scores for these chants on the Institute of Christ the King website here.
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,157
    Nice typesetting! What method do you use?
  • Arthur Connick
    Posts: 494
    I worked out a system using Photoshop Elements. Here's a screenshot of the setup.
    ScreenShot.pdf
    376K
  • rbjmartin
    Posts: 8
    Wow, what a cool program!
  • Bruce E. Ford
    Posts: 429
    I am very interested in what you have created.

    I know very little about music-writing software. Please, therefore, be indulgent enough to bear with my questions, which may strike you a stupid.

    Did you create a font (?) for use with software such as FINALE, or have you written your own program? If you have written your own program, does it run on Windows or only on Mac? Are you willing to sell whatever you have created (font or program)?

    I use both the Meinrad fonts and a custom-made Modern Chant Notation font to write chant with MSWord. Nothing could work faster than the modern chant font. Typesetting melismatic pieces with Meinrad fonts can, on the other hand, be very onerous. GREGOIRE does not work properly on my Windows XP computer. I would like to find something better than either Meinrad or Gregoire for writing melismatic pieces in conventional chant notation. I currently own a scaled-down version of FINALE called PRINT-MUSIC. If you have created a font for use with FINALE, can it be used with PRINT-MUSIC? I am willing to buy FINALE if I can use it advantageously. (PRINT-MUSIC has hitherto served my purposes.)
  • Arthur Connick
    Posts: 494
    The font used in these reproductions is not a normal computer font (such as Truetype), but rather a collection of brushes in Photoshop. There are about 900 "faces". There are simple ones (the punctum, for example) but also very complex ones with as many as 6 notes and various combinations of dots and horizontal and vertical episemas. The design is inspired by the font used in the Liber Usualis. Using this system, melismatic passages can be generated with just a few clicks. On the other hand, syllabic chants are a chore because I have to manually line up words and neumes.

    One could certainly design a Truetype font using the bitmaps from Photoshop. But I don't think this wouldn't actually improve the composition process. (Full disclosure: I've never used Finale or Print-Music so I can offer any recommendations there either way. Perhaps someone else can post a recommendation.)
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