Re: Style for Editorial Rests

On Wed, 24 Jun 2026, Vaughan McAlley wrote:

> I don’t like the look of changed note values and bracketed rests. I think
> it is all too distracting.
>
> Something that might bridge these two (untested) might be:
>
> \after 4. <>^\markup \rest { 8 } c2 % possibly make the rest grey?
>

Thank you for the suggestion. I have mocked it up using the functions

shaveQuarterOffWhole =
  \after 2. <>
  -\tweak TextScript.parent-alignment-X #CENTER
  ^\markup
  \fontsize #-3
  \with-color #grey
  \rest { 4 }
  \etc

… and the like. The output is attached. I like this approach and will
continue to think about it as an option!


The principal advantages are:


   1. I can print Lassus’s original note values.
   2. This method looks a lot like what we have historically done by hand (see
   this image
   <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2026-06/pngS7Jl6MtyEE.png>)
   … but, of course, much cleaner and more elegant.

Our choir has a rule that you take off half of the conductor’s beat in any
> music that precedes the advent of choral full scores. Once people are used
> to it, it saves an enormous amount of time.
>

This does sound like a useful rule! But in this piece, my choirmaster beats
whole notes (semibreves), so this principle would not cover the “shave a
quarter off a half” (i.e., sing aes4 r4 instead of aes2) cases.

On Wed, 24 Jun 2026, Lukas-Fabian Moser wrote:

> Yes, that's an 8th mode piece ("g hypomixolydian"), and it's interesting
> that the f♯ and b♭ are already in the 1594 Graz print of the work
> http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB00020AAD00000000 - it shows
> we're close to the year 1600 mark :-).
>
Thank you for teaching me the term “Hypomixolydian” (I only knew about
regular “vanilla” Mixolydian!). Thank you also for teaching me about U+266F
Music Sharp Sign Unicode Character
<https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+266F> and U+266D Music Flat Sign
Unicode Character <https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+266D>. I will have
to start using them in my emails! And thank you for sharing the link to the
1594 print; I don’t think I’d seen that one before.

> There's one thing I still do not understand, though: If you are creating a
> practical edition, why is it important to you to mark the rests as
> editorial, when you're content to print the shortened note before the rest
> without indication of their changed note value? I think any special marking
> of the rest without a corresponding marking on the preceding note is likely
> to be misunderstood, namely, that the editor simply added a rest that was
> missing in the original edition.
>
You might say that I want to have my cake and eat it, too. 😂

In all seriousness, I think that at the very least my edition needs to
specify in editorial notes (endnotes) where I have shortened durations.

But even better than only writing endnotes is to indicate, subtly, right on
the page (within the system of music) what’s “editorial.” Why?


   1. Conductors could change their minds during rehearsal, and it’s
   helpful to see immediately “This quarter rest was not there in the original
   source.”
   2. Labeling things within the music enables me to write a shorter
   endnote: “All rests with XYZ style are editorial early releases.” I don’t
   have to build and maintain, for the endnotes, a detailed table of “this
   rest in Cantus in measure NN,” “that rest in Altus in measure NN,” etc.

(By the by, I did some work on creating a music function for creating the
> above-staff 'editorial rhythm indications', but there are still some
> problems I have to think about if one wants a convenient user interface.)
>
Got it. Thanks. If I decide to pursue this route further, I will let you
know.