A Morley Canzonet in ABC

I've put a fair amount of work into typesetting some of Thomas Morley's "Canzonets for Three voices" so that the group I sing and play recorders with can perform from unbarred parts without having to deal with the facsimile. Here's what the cantus part looks like (size 194773) as Morley published it.

There are a number of differences between the way Thomas Morley published his canzonets and the way they are presented in even a very good modern edition.

• There were no scores, showing all the parts and the precise relationship between them.
• There were no bar lines in the parts.
• Musicians were expected to read a large number of clefs, and the clef for a given part (or even line within the part) was chosen so that there would be no or very few ledger lines below or above the staff.

Other than these differences, most of the notation by the late sixteenth century when Thomas Morley was writing was quite similar to what is in use now, and a musician trained in modern notation can fairly easily read a line from a facsimile. However, for a group of amateur players and singers to actually play from the facsimile presents a number of problems:

• They may have difficulty dealing with clefs that are not the standard G clef on the second line or F clef on the fourth line.
• Frequently the printing, or the reproduction or corruption of the printing leaves the performer in doubt about the actual notation. For instance, is a particular mark a rest, a dot, or a smudge? Does a note stem have 1 or 2 flags on it?
• Where, besides the beginning, can you restart the piece?

This page presents the results of transcribing the facsimile in abc.

I've been thinking about trying to do this for years, and have been concentrating on the TeX-based music publishing because it seems to not be as completely dependant on the measure as the unit it deals with as most of the other music printing programs I know about. In Renaissance music, there was no such thing as a measure, and the unit people thought in was the beat, which was usually either a half note or a whole note. If you try to write this music with barlines the way most modern editions do, you end up needing to have a lot of ties across bars. This is a problem for the performers because it is hard to realize that this note that's a quarter note tied to a half note is really the same kind of note as the dotted half note.

People play better from parts than from scores, partly because they have to concentrate harder, and partly because the score implies that the performer is responsible for hitting the first beat of the measure at the same time as everybody else, which is true for most music later than about 1700, but not for renaissance music. In the Renaissance, the performer's responsibility was to feel the same beat as everybody else, and within this beat to put the melodic line across as well as possible. Because the harmonic vocabulary is not very large, the music can work quite well even if some parts are doing a ritard when other parts aren't, as long as they all cadence together.

Here's what I do in ABC. (Note that this is no longer the way I actually transcribe, but if you like ABC, or find lilypond intimidating, it's still a possible way to do it, so I'm leaving it in here. LEC)

• First I type in the music with the words, one line at a time, leaving the line breaks where they are in the original I am typing from. I find I can touch type both words and music, and then line them up. I type each part into a separate file. Here's the file for the top line of the Morley: The part for the top line (cantus).

  Note that I retain as much as possible of Morley's spelling, because I find the Elizabethan laissez faire attitude fascinating. I do try to avoid things which would confuse me when singing, such as the use of u where we would use v, or i where we would use j.

• Then I use midi2abc and playmidi to proofread each part. I also use abc2ps to print out a part and compare it visually with the original. Here's what the printout looks like: Cantus part. Cantus part. (midi file 2425)
• Then I run a script (makescore)which creates a score. (The score in abc with all three parts)
• So far this has always needed more corrections. I find these iterations are less tedious because I have the instructions for what the computer does in a Makefile.
• I use both the score and the midifile for proofreading the data entry of the three parts.
• I decide where the rehearsal letters should go, and put them in using the syntax abc says is for guitar chords.
• For the final printout I use the -c option to abc2ps to let abc decide where to break the lines. Here's what it looks like. (image 67534)
• I also run another script, http://www.serpentpublications.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/makeallparts.txt to produce a file with all the parts in it, for emailing or posting on the web site. Here's the one for See, See, Myne Owne Sweet Jewel
• There is a snag to this method. abc2midi, the program that produces the midi files on this site, has a very 19th century view of accidentals, and assumes they are in force until the next barline. In the renaissance, accidentals were something composers put in when they felt like it, and assumed performers would put them in when they felt like it. So to get abc2midi to not carry over the accidentals to the end of the piece (since you haven't put in any barlines), you insert the line "%%MIDI nobarlines" in your ABC file.