Labeling Underlaid Lyrics Derived from Separate Sources

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shelomitbatdvorah
Posts: 4
Joined: 16 Jan 2021, 00:04

Labeling Underlaid Lyrics Derived from Separate Sources

Post by shelomitbatdvorah »

Howdy. This is probably a question that I could probably solve by hunting through a few books for models to follow, but my university's library is still closed--so here I am.

I'm preparing an example for a musicology article. It comes into play when I'm discussing a song lyric that was printed without music and postulate that said lyric was intended to fit to a particular melody because of its chorus and the overall scansion of the text. Ergo, I'm presenting said melody as it was arranged in a different source from the same era. Because the choruses of both texts--the one from the same source as the music, and the one from the text-only source--are related, and that similarity contributes to my argument, I want to show both texts in the same musical example. I also want readers to know which text is which.

Here's how I've got it set up right now; the link goes to to a TIFF in my Google Drive. The musical source arranges this melody into four voice parts in separate staves, tenor-counter-treble-bass from top to bottom, with the melody in the treble. I have paired Text 1 (the one originally printed with the music) with the alto part and Text 2 (the one from the music-less source) with the treble. I have provided a citation for Text 1 above the alto staff and the one for Text 2 above the treble staff. I have played around with the formatting a lot--italicizing the labels, making their font a different size than the lyrics,* enclosing them in parentheses, saying "text from"/"lyric from," giving the plain old citations with no gloss, etc., etc. At this point, I think it's clear which label goes with which set of lyrics. Yet the labels themselves persist in looking funny to me.

There are some limitations to what I can do. The publisher wants Garamond for everything. Citations are in Harvard style (god), which makes me leery of putting another colon after the page numbers. I can't make the example any larger than it currently is. Nor do I have the free space in my wordcount to out-and-out say "in figure 4.1, strophe four of the text provided by Brown is shown under the treble line" or the like.**

TL;DR: Is there some conventional way of formatting a label like this, for different lyrics applied to the same music? Everything I try looks namelessly bad. And yes, I've asked my editor, and no, she doesn't know.

*In the image I linked to, I have both of them set to 7 pt., which is what the publisher requested for the lyrics. The label text nonetheless looks slightly smaller. Dunno why, but I'm resolved not to lose sleep over it.
**There is, however, extensive discussion of both the textual and musical sources in the body of the article that ought to help readers along in understanding the example.
benwiggy
Posts: 833
Joined: 11 Apr 2016, 19:42

Re: Labeling Underlaid Lyrics Derived from Separate Sources

Post by benwiggy »

TBH, I don't think you would necessarily lose anything of your argument if you just printed the two variants as text, like additional verses of hymns. If you can't put the labels in the "Fig. 1" text, then they do cramp things somewhat.
shelomitbatdvorah
Posts: 4
Joined: 16 Jan 2021, 00:04

Re: Labeling Underlaid Lyrics Derived from Separate Sources

Post by shelomitbatdvorah »

benwiggy wrote: 18 Jan 2021, 08:14 TBH, I don't think you would necessarily lose anything of your argument if you just printed the two variants as text, like additional verses of hymns. If you can't put the labels in the "Fig. 1" text, then they do cramp things somewhat.
This is actually what I initially had done! But then both the reviewers wanted the texts underlaid to compare their scansions, so here we are. *sigh*
benwiggy
Posts: 833
Joined: 11 Apr 2016, 19:42

Re: Labeling Underlaid Lyrics Derived from Separate Sources

Post by benwiggy »

I would try negotiation:

"I plan to do this."
"No, we'd like you to do it this way."
"In order to achieve that, I'd need some accommodation on the word count of the Figs."

Could you set it in Short Score to save space?

Also: one other thought. Surely the publisher should be typesetting it, rather than expecting you to produce finished pages?
shelomitbatdvorah
Posts: 4
Joined: 16 Jan 2021, 00:04

Re: Labeling Underlaid Lyrics Derived from Separate Sources

Post by shelomitbatdvorah »

Oh, experimenting with condensed score is a good idea! I sort of absentmindedly copied the layout of the 1848 original (hence the unusual stave order), but there's no reason that's really necessary. The musical source is digitized on archive.org, should any reader really care about such niceties.

This is the first time I've had a publisher ask me to produce a musical example entirely by myself. I sent a PDF mockup with the first draft and presumed they would simply typeset it to suit their house style like usual, but then received a whole new set of guidelines to meet last week--staff height, font, DPI, maximum dimensions in inches, minimum dimensions in pixels, the whole shebang. I had a question about converting it from PDF to TIFF, which my editor said she had no clue how to do even though it was TIFF they were asking for. This is Bloomsbury's Music and Sound Studies series; you'd think they'd be used to this kind of thing!

It took even more scrambling to fix than it ought to have: ordinarily I would use Finale at my university's music library, but they're still closed for covid so I'm sussing things out at home on Lilypond, which I don't know nearly as well. Enough complaining, though! Thanks for the short-score suggestion, and I'll definitely deploy that argument if my editors are still giving me trouble.
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