A Swedish Song From 1903

[Marsilius]

Dear all,

I would be grateful for comments.

Please find attached the original manuscript as well as my engraving.

Victor Hugo Wickström once was a cultural celebrity in Sweden: a liberal newspaper editor and member of parliament, a man of erudition with a PhD in history, friends with leading socialist and liberal figures.

Frans von Heland was a colonel and an amateur composer from the same city (Östersund).

Both are now mainly forgotten.

[OCTO]

It is a nice, old typeface style engraving. Congratulations! I think it is one of the typefaces by Abraham Lee.
Just one comment: I feel that the general line width should be increased to match the bolder typeface. It means: staff lines, hairpins, stems and bar lines (particularly far left).

[benwiggy]

I think the lyric text size is slightly too big. The two lines are a bit cramped, and reducing them slightly would give them more space, and also affect the note spacing less.

[tisimst]

100% agree with benwiggy. That was the first thing that caught my eye.

[David Ward]

That's an interesting song and I like the way you have engraved it (bearing in mind that I'm a composer, not a pro-engraver)

While agreeing that the words here may be in a font that is a *little* larger than necessary, I find it worth mentioning that at 80 I'm often beginning to find it more difficult to read the libretto in (eg) an opera study score (or even in some large sized full scores) than the music itself. A surprisingly large number of scores, even performers' copies of songs with piano, use a lyric font that is uncomfortably small (for me at least).

Maybe not too many scores are to be read by 80 year olds, but many people a lot younger than me have eyesight that is rather worse than mine.

It's something to be born in mind, anyway.

[Marsilius]

Thank you all for kind and insightful comments.

I will experiment with the size of the lyrics and the spacing between the stanzas.

The line thickness is an interesting topic, thanks for commenting on it. I just left Finale for Lilypond and I am adapting and getting used to the thicker engraving of it. Adding even more blackness didn't come to my mind. I have a classic Peters Edition of Schubert songs and right now I am comparing it with the Lilypond default settings. Yes, the slurs are thicker in the Peters Edition, but other elements are not — stems and bar lines are at least as thick in Lilypond.

The typeface is MTF Haydn. I agree, very nice indeed. It is said to model the look of Edition Peters, that is why I referred to the Schubert songs.

[OCTO]

Thank you all for kind and insightful comments.

I will experiment with the size of the lyrics and the spacing between the stanzas.

The line thickness is an interesting topic, thanks for commenting on it. I just left Finale for Lilypond and I am adapting and getting used to the thicker engraving of it. Adding even more blackness didn't come to my mind. I have a classic Peters Edition of Schubert songs and right now I am comparing it with the Lilypond default settings. Yes, the slurs are thicker in the Peters Edition, but other elements are not — stems and bar lines are at least as thick in Lilypond.

The typeface is MTF Haydn. I agree, very nice indeed. It is said to model the look of Edition Peters, that is why I referred to the Schubert songs.

What I meant about the lines thickness is more about how it balances with other elements in the score. The comparison with other printed scores must include comparison of all elements found in a score, not separately. The music and text typefaces in your score are far more pronounced than the lines in my opinion. If they were not, then I wouldn't notice it. A simple experiment is to print out the page, put it on a music stand and step back to see what you see the best. In a good score you see always everything the best, or at least all equally well.

[benwiggy]

A simple experiment is to print out the page, put it on a music stand and step back to see what you see the best. In a good score you see always everything the best, or at least all equally well.

That reminds me of an old rule in UK book design: the title of a book should be designed so that when it is displayed in the window of a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, it should be readable from the other side of the street!

[John Ruggero]

1. Along with the lyrics, the two cresc. indications look a little too big to me.

2. There is an error regarding the triplets on the second and third systems on the second page. There should be no eighth rests following the quarter notes. The quarter notes are intended to hold full value. What appear to be eighth rests are actually the "3" of the triplet indications that have been written on the note side in conjunction with the triplet slurs, in the old style of doing triplets. Since these slurs do not appear to be legato slurs, you might just eliminate them since since you are placing the "3" on the beam style in the modern way.

3. The slurs should point to the first and last note heads, not the stems. As a result they are a little too long. See ms. 4-5 for example.

[John Ruggero]

Also, the slur that starts on the first measure of the second staff on the second page, should most likely begin on the second beat of the measure, that is, with the note E, and stop on the last note of that measure, that is, on the note B. The composers of this era tend to be a little imprecise with beginnings and endings of slurs.