Like wine with a meal, the text font(s) need to be paired with the music, and a page of Bravura will look very different surrounded by Plantin or Nepomuk or Minion or Avenir. You can have Bass Figures from one font and dynamics from another the trill symbol from a third and so on. You can mix and match fonts, using Dorico’s Font Styles and Music Symbols editor. There’s an argument that using a different font is a pejoratively ‘easy’ way of creating a unique design. That’s a bit harsh: you can still create personality and individuality with ‘default’ fonts, though it’s perhaps more difficult. Comparing with text fonts, Times New Roman (and Helvetica/Arial) are often seen as ‘the absence of a style decision’ (and there’s even a page saying the same about Minion Pro). You want your page to be familiar, but not generic.Īs nice as Bravura and New Century Schoolbook/Academico are (and better than many preceding music fonts coupled with Times), you might not want your page to look like everyone else’s page. There’s a balance between tradition and individuality.
Of course the window dressing is crucial! Music engraving has as much to do with graphic design as it does with music. We’re making a page of visual information. Wondering if it is just a way to put window dressing on when additional dressing isn’t all that necessary
