I just received the advance publisher copies for a new publication I recently completed: American Hymnody, 1640–1930.
This 840-page volume is a scholarly anthology of American hymn tunes and texts from colonial psalmody to 1930. It traces the origins of Lowell Mason, shape-note singing, spirituals, etc. There are extensive footnotes and chapter summaries for every section. All source material has been preserved as closely as possible.
The music was all done in Dorico of course, mostly using Sebastian. Layout in InDesign. I did elect to use short flags to mimic the notation of some represented historical periods, which I know some folks may take issue with, but for me it was a very clean look. I also had to recreate some oddball tunes that required non-standard shape note systems, so that was a challenge. Here and there I encountered little notation oddities. Overall though, it was very smooth sailing (just time… so much time).
I don’t want to post a link, as that feels too self-promoting, but you can find it to purchase online (pre-order, shipping October). Maybe that’s semantics. Anyways, here it is:
Congratulations, @dan_kreider! It looks gorgeous. So nice to see the clean and elegant look of the Dorico output (combined with InDesign) printed on paper. I wish much success with the publication.
And thank you for sharing it with us!
Extremely impressive! Nice to see the historic dimension, tenor melodies and all.
I’m surprised to say the short-flags-look positively strikes me as tidy, balanced and characteristic in the context of this work. I guess you had to modify the font itself to get this to work – did you just mirror Sebastian’s upstem short flag for the downstem flags or is it a modified glyph?
Did you use a separate Dorico file for every tune? – then it could get quite time-consuming to change for example some engrave setting globally later on I imagine.
And may I ask, how did the proof-reading go for this project? How many people worked on that and how many passes did it take to spot all (or most) of the errors?
Thank you. Yes, I modified Sebastian and replaced regular flags with short ones. There is no upside-down short flag, so I made it in a font program and imported it.
I always do one Dorico file per song. That really is the only safe and simple way. You’re right that it makes the initial decisions very important. I’m hopeful for future batch edit options in Dorico, whereby we can change engraving options for many files at once.
The proofreading was three people, one careful pass each. It was particularly difficult because we were careful to match the sources, which themselves had occasional errors. You can see a partwriting “error” in the bass in the fourth photo, but it is faithful to the original source. That made edits very time-consuming.
Anyways, here it is:
and thanks!