Choral Public Domain Library

Maggie, your succinct analysis is essentially correct. Here is a summary (using sort of LilyPond-ish notation) to summarize the relevant pages of Behind Bars on notating rests. I hope this helps. Rests must be notated to indicate clearly the divisions of the bar. 1. Rests of one or more beats may on...

Hi Maggie,

I don't have time now to give a complete answer but will try tomorrow. The definitive treatment, however, is found in Elaine Gould's Behind Bars, pp 160-164. This is the music notator's bible. I'll try to summarize it for you tomorrow.

I don't think we should over-think this. The BSM Style Guide of the Northwestern School of Music is quite explicit: 15.1 Generic titles, such as symphony, concerto, and sonata, are in roman type and are capitalized. They are not put in boldface, italicized, or placed within quotation marks. Toccata ...

Roughly 8 years ago or so, I advocated for putting tune names of hymns (that actually have a tune name) in square brackets, although not with all caps at the time. It fell on deaf ears with a couple of people active at CPDL who had their own opinions on hymns, hymn tunes & hymn setting, then (bu...

Edit: Oops, earlier I mistakenly put a semicolon after "sc" when it should have been a (template) pipe "|" ... I've fixed that now. Hi Richard, Don't move the page, just insert {{DISPLAYTITLE:{{sc|Milton}} (William Billings)}} at the beginning of the page (actually it can be ins...

To get formatting of a page name, one uses the "Magic Word" DISPLAYTITLE. For example, {{DISPLAYTITLE:Come down, O Love divine [{{sc|Down Ampney}}] (Ralph Vaughan Williams)}} would make a page title read: Come down, O Love divine [D OWN A MPNEY ] (Ralph Vaughan Williams) I prefer the above...

Well, well, what do you know!! ChoralWiki already has a small caps template {{sc}}, so that, for example,

{{sc|Down Ampney}} produces: DOWN AMPNEY ... as desired.

I would like to see Caps&Smallcaps for tune names, too, but my preference for square brackets for the tune name is that it denotes something uniquely extra, as parentheses in titles really are supposed to enclose only the composer/arranger. Unfortunately, html and wiki markup, unlike Don Knuth's...

I've created a page ChoralWiki:Newly available modern music scores at the ChoralWiki which provides a listing of all new Modern music scores at CPDL posted in the past 90 days. It makes use of Template:New score pages in a simple manner. You might wish to use this template on your own User page (or ...

I had advocated putting the tune in square brackets in the title, for example: Let thy Blood in mercy poured [Rasmus] (Charles H. Giffen) ... but this wasn't a popular idea several years ago.

Maybe views now are different and it is time for a change?

Hi Susan. Please do!! I'll also try to think of something.

Thanks, Susan, and welcome to CPDL. I know Matthew Curtis pretty well, as well as his work. He sings you Magnificat in F beatifully.

Chuck Giffen

One needs to realize that Short, Common, and Long meter designations apply only to iambic texts. For example, by itself, 88. 88 refers to a tune with four lines, each with 8 syllables in trochaic rhythm (SwSwSwSw); on the other hand, 88. 88 (L.M.) also stands for a tune with four lines each with 8 s...

My question is whether posting such files on a publicly accessible site such as CPDL violates the copyright. The short answer is, yes. Why? Because a MIDI file encodes the notes and durations of the piece, and these can be imported by any of several music notation programs to reconstruct the score....

Thanks for your insightful comments, Christopher. My own take is similar, although slightly different (and I do have trouble with the term "pitch" in "original written pitch"): Although original clefs tend not to be preferred anymore (unfortunately, for those of us who are not tr...