Ernest Grosjean, Absoute

Most of the typesetting I do concerns Baroque organ music. And typesetting that kind of music is relatively straight forward. Besides a title to the composition, a tempo indication and perhaps some manual changes there are there ae only music notes to typeset. As the music is often polyphonic in character, I had to develop a style for engraving polyphonic music in a clearly readable way. And as I typeset music newly from manuscript score, I needed to develop a way to combine footnotes with small score excerpts to annotate editorial decisions.

Other than that there is not much to do in Baroque organ music.

As music history progressed composition grew moore and more complex. Along with the growing complexity of the music came the habit of composers to notate more precisely there intention with their written music. That meant an increase in registration indication, slurs, double slurs, dynamic inidcations, both graphically (hairpins) as in text and other playing indications. The challenge then is to engrave all these indications without cluttering the score. After all, the better readable the score is, the less attention goes to reading the music and the more attention can go to the actual playing.

To get experience with engraving this kind of music, I decided to chose a collection of French organ (harmonium) music and to typeset the music. That way I can develop a style to engrave graphically more challenging music with of course the goal to create scores that are as readable as possible.

The collection I chose is "Pièces pour orgue ou harmonium, 33 pièces facile" by Ernest Grosjean. The piece I publish today is already number 23 in the series. By now, I think I can positively say I developed a style to typeset this kind of music in a very readable way. So I could stop this series and move on to some more challenging music. But I have a tendency to be 'complete' and don't like to abandon projects like this. So, I'll plod on, and typeset the remaining 10 pieces as well.

"Absoute" is a rite and prayer of the Catholic liturgy that ends the funeral ceremony at the church. It includes a song that implores the total deliverance of the deceased's sins, then a sprinkling and a censing of the body. Grosjean expresses this in dark colours and lost of diminished seventh chords.

Score: http://partitura.org/index.php/ernest-grosjean-absoute

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