Add new "soft accent" character to 'Articulations' range

[dspreadbury]

Originally requested by Kentaro Sato, and supported by other community members, including Alex Plötz.

This picture excerpted from the piano reduction of Lortzing's Zar und Zimmermann shows the symbol in question:

It also appears in the violin 1 and violin 2 parts of Brahms's fourth symphony, bars 9-12:

It's debatable whether this is a specific kind of messa di voce dynamic marking or more genuinely an articulation of some kind, but since it is relatively widely used it warrants inclusion. Its form is essentially a reversed accent next to a normal accent, designed for centering above the note or chord on which the "soft accent" should be played.

Kentaro Sato also requests versions combined with staccato, tenuto, and staccato-tenuto, though no sources for their use in published music have yet been provided.

[KentaroSato]

Hi. This is another example of "soft accent." This one is Schumann, I guess.

By the way, the Japanese version of Finale comes with own font set called "Kosaku," and Kosaku does have "soft accent" as a glyph. I have also requested Japanese music publishers to provide some examples of staccato, tenuto etc with soft accent. These markings seems to be pretty common in choral notations.

[mdgood]

I still don't understand how this differs from the existing messa di voce? All these examples look like messa di voce to me.

[KentaroSato]

Although there is no exact rule for messa di voce, to me, if messa di voce is to be done on a long note, it would look like this... And, in my opinon, the example below produces different result.

Of course, on shorter notes, these might looks and produces similar results...

[mdgood]

In my experience, your second example is the more common way to notate a messa di voce, and is what I would expect the current SMuFL glyph to represent.

[KentaroSato]

Oh, so, above examples produces the same results? In my experience, nobody has performed them same so far (including Hollywood session players, members of London Symphony Orchestra and Sydney Symphony Orchestra). The glyph in the latter example has always been performed like "soft accent," quick and gentle crescendo and diminuendo on the attack of the note.

[zolaemil]

As far as I can see the confusion stems from the fact that the meaning (i.e. how to perform it) of the "compound symbol that is essentially a reversed accent next to a normal accent" is ambiguous. Some people argue it indicates a messa di voce dynamic, others are on the opinion that it indicates a soft accent articulation.

I see two ways to deal with this:

1. Introduce soft accent articulation, while keep messa di voce dynamic as well. (Note that the two symbols may look very similar, or even exactly the same).
2. Rename the compound symbol that is "essentially a reversed accent next to a normal accent" that does not indicate the required performance.

Note that (2) requires that one is able to encode the semantic information by other means, but that might even be a good thing... or not.

[KentaroSato]

Sorry, it took me long to provide more examples. There are several of these in the work I will conduct next... "Blue Roses for Female Voices and Piano" by Takatomi Nobunaga, published by Ongaku no Tomo sha Corporation (Tokyo, Japan). ISBN 978-4-276-55458-0

Again, Japanese version of Finale does includes a glyph for soft accent in its default font, Kosaku.

[KentaroSato]

Just in case, this is a pic from my original post.

[dspreadbury]

To address this requirement, I propose creating a new Articulation supplement range, with a block of 16 reserved code points from U+ED40 through U+ED4F. The following 8 glyphs will be added to this new range:

Name	Description	Code point
articSoftAccentAbove	Soft accent above	ED40
articSoftAccentBelow	Soft accent below	ED41
articSoftAccentStaccatoAbove	Soft accent-staccato above	ED42
articSoftAccentStaccatoBelow	Soft accent-staccato below	ED43
articSoftAccentTenutoAbove	Soft accent-tenuto above	ED44
articSoftAccentTenutoBelow	Soft accent-tenuto below	ED45
articSoftAccentTenutoStaccatoAbove	Soft accent-tenuto-staccato above	ED46
articSoftAccentTenutoStaccatoBelow	Soft accent-tenuto-staccato below	ED47

[dspreadbury]

This has now been done. See the new Articulation supplement range.

[oldgrump]

Messa di voce (according to some, mezza di voce) consists of crescendo + decrescendo. The ‘soft accent‘, generally known elsewhere as ‘closed accent’, consists of an ordinary accent mark followed by a reversed accent mark <>. It was common enough at one time, and it is a mystery to me why until now fonts with music symbols have not included it. SMUFL will save the day, I believe. I can now only request that for downloading SMUFL-consistent fonts we can have a simple ‘download’ button, and not have to chase our own tails around Github trying to figure out sentences in thick Geekspeak. I don’t want to download source code; I just want to download the bloody font, thank you. I have had T-Clock on my computer for around 20 years, and have had to download it for one reason or another several times, but now I find that Github has the current version and I cannot figure out how to download it. With some time on Google I finally found a site with an older version and straightforward downloading.