A topic I think about quite often, seeing as I both compose and perform and have been doing so for many years.
‘Bravura’ is a great font, and applicable for all genres of music. Here in North America, there are different ‘musical factions’ (..amongst other factions) that love to argue about ‘handwritten vs typeset’, ‘vintage vs modern’, ‘Jazz vs Classical fonts’, ‘Show/Studio vs Broadway’, etc. etc.
It would be great to hear from people around the world as to what some of the font preferences are for different genres of music. (ex: Do British classical performers prefer to read from one font vs another? Do German jazz players prefer ‘hand-written vs type’? Do Japanese studio players have a preference? What’s happening in Toronto? Do the LA studio players prefer a different font compared to those in Europe or Asia? What do our fellow Australians use for all of their various busy music scenes?
Look forward to hearing what people around the world are doing!
Since you mentioned Bravura, I assume you want to hear about music font choices, and not text fonts? I’ve never really done any historical work, only new work, so if historical work is your area then I could maybe understand using a historical font. Other than that, I think notational clarity is notational clarity regardless of style. I use the same font settings when I’ve done copy work for the NY Phil as when I do arrangements that will be read in a dimly lit NYC jazz club.
I grew up reading hand copying and was originally trained as a hand copyist myself, but I dislike most “handcopied” fonts. You’re never going to fool someone into thinking it’s actually handcopied and those fonts are generally less legible than an “engraved” font. I just don’t see the point. I don’t want my music pretending to be something it isn’t, especially at the expense of legibility.
I posted a Music Font Glyph Comparison 4 years ago here:
(My son is a D1 collegiate swimmer now. Tempus fugit!) I’ve purchased quite a few fonts since then so should probably update it at some point. Bravura generally is a bit heavy on the page for my taste. I use Bravura noteheads and default to Bravura, but have substituted many different fonts in my own house style. I use Sebastian for sharps and naturals, and Scherzo for flats, for example. My time sig numerals are Leipzig I think. My clefs are a bunch of different fonts too.
I don’t really feel the need to be limited to a single music font. Obviously the end result has to be a visually cohesive whole, not just a potpourri of glyphs you like, but you can certainly mix and match between fonts IMO.
NIce to hear what you’re doing about accidentals, as I know what you mean. Will try this myself, thanks!..and I do remember seeing your Font comparison a few years ago. Need to revisit that for sure.
I’ve like the look of ‘Golden Age’ for some horn section parts, as they’re ‘thick’ enough to read with music stand lights. Had to change the Text font though. But have been using Bravura most of the time.
It’s worth mentioning that the Berklee School of Music now recommends not using “handwritten” music fonts.
TBH, the vast majority of readers probably neither notice nor care, as long as the music is legible and well laid out.
I showed someone a page of Sebastian, and they said “It just looks like music. What have you done?”.
And in many ways, that’s how it should be. The design is the medium, not the message, so if people are paying attention to the design, then that’s getting in the way of the message.
The same goes for type – apart from type nerds who can actually recognise different typefaces at sight, most people don’t say “Oh, I see you’ve used Times New Roman”. They just read the words.
There’s plenty of crappy scores on CPDL made with really nice fonts.
As a performer (trombone) doing a lot of sight-reading, I do like to look at music notes that aren’t ‘too thick’, ‘too light’…but ‘just right’!
And, yes, hand-written fonts don’t really help out very much as far as overall suitability and making sure that you get a good performance. As FredGunn points out, accidentals can be too ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ and can interrupt the eye-flow as well. So many various ‘hand font emulations’ have note flags that are crazy and take up way too much room, etc. etc.
I always feel that if the noteheads flow ‘backwards’ or just appear as very round blobs (with no ‘forward motion’) then the sight-reading does suffer, and then the overall musicality of the group suffers if players are feeling as if they’re ‘stuck in place’ by the appearance of the notes. (That’s the beauty of a great copyist who used a Pelikan ink nib… the notes were ‘moving forward’!)
I know this is all very subjective; like many musicians, I’ve had to read faint pencil markings that look as if someone was using their opposite hand to copy music and it looked like the ravings of a lunatic! …thankful for software notation programs!
That was the first lesson my twelve-year-old self learned from my future theory and composition teacher: if you want musicians to read your work, you have to make it neat/clear.
In the years following I learned much more from this generous, but very exacting teacher, but that first lesson was the most appropriate starting point.
Yep. I played in the band for the BMI Composer’s Workshop a lot in the early/mid-00s. In addition to a great musical experience, it was a real-time notation laboratory too. Everyone in the band was a great sight-reader, so if there was something that threw us during a reading, it was usually either poor orchestration or poor notation. Seeing what orchestration caused issues was very interesting to me as a composer, and seeing notation caused issues was particularly interesting to me as a copyist.
Of course, some composers brought in music without really paying any attention to the layout, rhythmic notation, or enharmonics as Finale/Sibelius had played the hell out of it on their computer. These always got the worst performance out of the ensemble. If they can’t be bothered to notate their music clearly, why should I be bothered to try to decipher what they mean?
When I was at university (mid-1970’s), there was a group of up-and-coming young composition students who practised the fad of writing all their notes with the stems on the wrong side. They could read it quite easily, but most others had trouble as it took quite some getting used to. I have often wondered whether they changed their notation “style” to something a bit more “normal” and, if they did, was that because of the influence of musicians who had to (try to) read those manuscript parts?
Similarly, I remember after having submitted one of my early attempts at four-part harmony to my music teacher and hearing her play it back quite differently from what I thought I had written, I exclaimed “but that’s not what I wrote”. Her polite but firm response, which I have not forgotten in the fifty-five (or more) years since then, was “that’s what it looks like”.
Similar to what my band director told me after the band read one of my early arrangements: “You should be a composer. Then you can say you meant it to sound that way.”
I played 2 gigs on the weekend (trombone). One of them was in a band for which I arrange/transcribe horn section parts (R&B/Funk/Rock/Soul), and then I was in a big band playing standard old tunes for listening/dancing.
I’d copied and printed out some of my horn parts (over the last 3 years) using either Dorico and ‘Bravura’ or ‘Golden Age’ music fonts, and some parts were also done in Sibelius ‘Opus’ or ‘Norfolk’.
I think that I like ‘Bravura’ the best for overall reading experience. I mean, they all look fine to the eye, but ‘Bravura’ has something nice to it when it comes to end result formatting and printing. Easy to read at a distance, in poorer lighting conditions, etc.
And, Sibelius with ‘Norfolk’ looks fine too (but it’s essentially a copy of ‘Bravura’)
The charts with ‘Golden Age’ are good, but the huge eighth-note flag stems aren’t great and almost confusing to look at. ‘Opus’ is nice and useable for sure.
The big band gig? Fonts were ‘all over the map’, from hand-copying with pen/pencil really crazy ‘over-size’ fonts. They had some new charts re-done or created using MuseScore. (…you can almost tell right away what you’re looking at!..those charts just look very ‘amateur’ and too ‘light’…too generic looking and ‘uninspiring’ to read…just looking like very serviceable parts created by a computer with no ‘personality’)
(…how to stay amused while playing old big band charts for the thousandth-time!)
[quote=“cmillar, post:5, topic:1040146”]
Pelikan ink nib
[/quote] Nice to hear that these were good. I collect fountain pens mainly with music related themes and also have a Pelikan with music tip. Not so easy to use for guitar rasqueados
