This is a subjective question, and I understand some folks who do this sort of thing might not want to give away their secrets.
I’m preparing a scholarly historical anthology of church music. It needs to have a very academic feel. I do plan on laying it out in InDesign.
My question is, what music font would convey this best? I certainly have no objection to using Bravura, and I like Sebastian as well. Are there other engraving tweaks I could consider?
Thanks in advance.
As long as the font is clear and readable, and doesn’t stray far away from modern standard conventions, then I don’t think any font is necessarily ‘more academic’.
Bravura, Sebastian, MTF-Cadence, FinaleMaestro would all be fine. I wouldn’t use anything that shouts “look at me”.
I’ve been using Minion Pro for the main text and Times New Roman for footnotes that are in a small type size (9pt) because it seems more readable to me than most at a small size.
In any publication, not just scholarly, the important consideration is consistency. Regardless of music font, I’d keep typeface choices to two: one for headings and one for body text. Anything else dealing with text should be limited to styles and sizes.
There are any number of music fonts that will fill the bill for that “church music” look. Personally, I’d stick with the “wide” variant of Finale Maestro. It’s a modern font with all the bells and whistles, and the wide variant looks more like the old-style hymnal engraving. There are others that are closer, but they may have quirks that make them difficult to set properly. You’ll just have to test drive a few to see what looks best to you.
Interesting, thanks. Technically Minion Pro should be more legible for smaller point sizes since it has a smaller x-height. But I don’t know.
Surely you mean larger? Famously, ITC versions of typefaces have larger x-heights than standard for exactly this reason.
Minion does have optical sizes, of course, and so should be legible at any size.
But we’ve strayed into text typefaces now. Any decent ‘body’ serif typeface should be fine. Lots of academic papers are written in Baskerville; and in Knuth’s approximation of New Century Schoolbook; also Minion, Plantin, …
I think ‘academic’ is more about the design, than the choice of font.
Minion Pro is fine, and if you like it for small point sizes, it should work just as well at the larger. I prefer a larger x-height, but that’s just, like, my opinion, man. 
I use Merriweather for the body text in my novels, but for a lower x-height, look at Corundum Text or Filosofia.
For the text fonts, I would go for any of Adobe’s ‘Pro’ typefaces: Arno Pro, Warnock Pro, Garamond Premier Pro, etc. They all have a complete range of optical sizes. (And I’m pretty sure they’re available as part of a Creative Cloud subscription.)
Yes, larger x-height sorry…