Just by coincidence, I’m using it in the new piece I’m working on. Looks great. I’ve vacillated between several different fonts since I started Dorico over a year ago and GA is working very nicely for this current piece.
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Something I like in Golden Age is that it is a very versatile font. We have a lot of jazz fonts among which to choose, but not many with a more subdued quality, being also good for a handwritten classical score. I can only think to LS Iris and MTF Improviso that can be used for this scope.
I know that you don’t print a classical score with handwritten fonts, but you can work with them. Using handwritten fonts while composing is like using the draft mode in some wordprocessor, where you can remove all or most of the typographic features, letting one focus on the pure text. Think to Scrivener or Ulysses. These fonts are the perfect companion for Galley View.
Fonts like Golden Age let me ignore the final output, and only focus on the ongoing act of writing. The feeling they convey is that of something faster, more agile, not permanent and ready to be deleted, reworked, rewritten without any hesitation. I don’t know why, but they make me feel I can stain my fingers without too much harm.
Paolo
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I am selling bottles of high quality carbon ink that you can use to stain your fingers. Works great. Contact me for details. Very authentic - very hard to get off.
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Is the download on GitHub the most recent version?
Hmmm…a lot of the scores I have on my web site used handwritten fonts like Finale’s Broadway Copyist, and I thought that was perfectly fine. I even have an old score from 1980 for violin and piano that was just too complicated to try to notate in Finale (and perhaps even Dorico) and is left as a PDF of the scanned handwritten score I did. If you look at scores by Feldman, Shapey, Dallapiccola and others, many (and in the case of Shapey, most) of them are handwritten by their respective composers. So I’m not sure there is anything wrong with using a handwritten font in a final version of a score. Just my $0.02.
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Yes. It’s currently slightly ahead of that bundled with Dorico, containing a fix in the metadata that affects slurs and quaver flags.
One question to ask is: if you and these other composers could have got your music printed, accurately, quickly and cheaply, would you/they have preferred that? And the same goes for jazz arrangers desperately copying out parts for tonight’s show; or even the subversive students making the Real Book.
Handwritten fonts have a place, but of course everyone knows that it’s not really done by hand. Every font choice send a message. There are some very attractive hand-fonts, like LS Iris, which I’m sad to say I missed out on. I do like Golden Age, obviously. But Finale Jazz is just awful.
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Well, in the case of Dallapiccola, some of his scores were in his own writing since he felt that it was important for composers to have good penmanship, and his handwritten scores are so beautiful and clear to read that they may be better than what was achievable at that time from a printed score. That said, most of his scores are printed. Shapey’s scores are mostly handwritten I suspect because of their utter complexity and the messiness is a feature rather than a bug. Plus it’s probably cost-prohibitive in many cases since his music is so rarely performed (and most of the scores I saw of his were in the University of Chicago library where he was active during my attendance there). Most of Feldman’s works are printed but some exist in both forms. I have a print version of Patterns in a Chromatic Field as well as a handwritten copy and there are some differences. Same with Triadic Memories. The handwritten MS lines up some notes differently and probably more clearly shows Feldman’s intent. Good explanation here.
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And is there a way to incorporate your updates in GitHub to Dorico 6.1.1?
Download the font and JSON file from github, and replace the existing ones on your computer.
BTW, my latest work used the Golden Age font, and I’m likely to standardize on it moving forward. I really like it! Am going to update the font from GitHub.
antifascist music.pdf (800.1 KB)
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