Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: Making a three-line layout from a one-line catch. (Read 2137 times) previous topic - next topic

Making a three-line layout from a one-line catch.

Stranger than you may think:  I'm transcribing the catches and rounds from "The Catch Club" or "Merry Companions", the official songbook of the Catch Club of 1763 London and I'm running into some that just aren't breaking correctly.

for an example of this,  visit www.sosyourmom.com/cachtest.html
and see one which DOES break well ("My Man John" by Purcell) and one upon which I've given up ("To The Viol None Can Compare", also by Purcell.)

Any help will be most appreciated, but be warned... this is not the only one, nor have I any shame about pestering for information!

Seriously,  my thanks in advance and my appreciation for all of you who post here.  A most useful and enjoyable forum, entirely.

Re: Making a three-line layout from a one-line catch.

Reply #1 –
By not "breaking" do you mean that they don't make harmonic sense as rounds? or that you can't make the lyrics fit the tunes? I've had both problems dealing with 17th-century English popular music - I suspect their proofreading wasn't always very good.

Some of them may have gimmicks, like a repeat at the fifth instead of the unison. If you try it at the unison or octave, the first few notes will sound fine, and then it will get weird. Or they may have minor typesetting/copyist errors that become evident as the other voices come in and the harmony doesn't work out. I have a short one by Thomas Morley ("Praise God upon the Lute and Violl") that I've never quite made work.

Re: Making a three-line layout from a one-line catch.

Reply #2 –
Thank'ee John,  you had the idea down.  I simply did all three lines atop each other and then looked for where the last measures would line up. (Hardly musical but I ascribe to "The Engineers Life-philosophie" or "Cut to fit, file to match, paint to hide."

Laying them one atop the other not only allows one to "fuddle" them into the correct relationship,  but sets this up for saving as the "staggered" files.

Solved!