Re: NR 2.1 Vocal music

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 9:08 AM, Trevor Daniels <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> 2.1.8 Opera and stage musicals ready for review

Err... 2.1.6 in today's current git?  ok, doing so.  I've forgotten
anything else we've discussed about 2.1 vocal music, which may or may
not be a good idea for this doc review.

- I see significant material in the "top" of 2.1.6.  Remember that
some people only look at the "leaves" of the documentation.  In this
case, that's "References for opera and stage musicals".

I'm not certain how important the definition of conductor's score,
orchestral parts, libretto, etc., are, but if they stay where they
are, then the rest of this subsection should not assume that the
reader has seen those definitions.

I'd also be tempted to move some of these definitions to the Glossary,
and omit the others.  I mean, I'd expect that people are sufficiently
familiar with "conductor's score" and "orchestral parts", whereas
"libretto" could definitely use a Glossary entry.  At first glance,
I'd then make this material merely:
The music, lyrics and dialogue to opera and stage musicals are usually
set out in one or more of the following forms: a conductor's score,
the orchestra parts, a vocal score, a vocal book, and a libretto.

...
actually, I think I definitely recommend moving this material into the
References, and splitting the long list of References into their
relative sections.  i.e. have two lists:
"... one or more of the following forms:"
  * Conductor's score:
      - grouping staves, nested staff groups.  (you're missing a comma
before the "see Nested staff groups, btw)
      - hiding parts
      - separating systems
           NB: umm, aren't those all the subsections of 1.6 ?  I'd be
sorely tempted just to say "Many useful techniques for preparing
conductor scores are presented in Staff notation".  I mean, it's a
short section, and at least 80% of it is highly relevant to preparing
scores.  It's not too much to suggest that the user to read the whole
thing.

- is Page formatting any more relevant to musicals than other forms of
music?  I suppose it might be important for preparing a small booklet
(i.e. print on 4 sides of a folded a4 sheet).  OTOH, I'd expect that
to be relevant to hymn as well, and possibly choral stuff in general.

I'm quite willing to believe that we should improve the docs for
spacing (especially since I've been publicly saying that I wanted a
complete rewrite of that chapter for the past 3 years :).  And in
particular, it might be good to have a dedicated section for small
booklets / alternate forms of music display / etc.


- notwithstanding all the above, I like the specific mention of
instrument names for character names.  I still think that you should
only have a single link to Staff notation, but I think it's definitely
worth having 1-2 sentences explaining about the instrument name trick.
 Alternately, this could be done with a @lilypond .  For comparison,
see 2.3.1 Bowing indications, Harmonics, etc.  None of that is *new*
notation (pretty much everything is already in the articulation
appendix), but we decided that it's worth giving a few short examples
for clarity.

... err, does anybody know why snap pizzicato is a snippet?  and WTF
are we "quoting" wikipedia ?!
added as
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1261

anyway, although we really discourage duplicating material, we make
allowances for small, well-focused cases of specific instrumental (and
vocal) writing.


err, "dialogue over music" just says TBC.  Am I looking at an old
version?  I'm pretty certain that I just compiled the docs from
scratch (testing Carl's funky fix)... did you push everything?  I'm
wondering again about the 2.1.8 vs. 2.1.6 question... I'll stop
reviewing whatever it is that I'm reviewing, and come back to this
another day.

Cheers,
- Graham