Help with renaissance notation! :'(

[marinmarais]

Hello everybody! I'm a mexican musician and baroque music researcher.

In these days arrived to my hands a rare and magnificent document, sheet music composed by a mexican genius woman.

I have never had problems passing to actual musical notation the scores I work with, but I have a problem now, this is not baroque notation...

The facsimilar that I have consists of 4 pages, Soprano I part: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.p ... 141159.jpg , Soprano II part http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.p ... 93afbb.jpg , Alto http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.p ... e1f827.jpg and Bass http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.p ... 7ec966.jpg .

Could you help me giving me an idea of how transcribe it into actual notation?
There are no barlines, I see some crotchets (quarters) without stems, beside crotchets with stems, and minims (half) with flags! And about the rests, they are very confusing!

I tried to transcribe it "2:1" but, the minims (half) with flags do not help me, I don't know what to do!

Could you help me?

Arturo Escorza.

[sbeckmesser]

I took a look only at the bass part (usually the best place to start in a pieces like this) and I noted the top line (Madre . . .) is notated to be in common time (C, or "4/4"). Counting backward from the fermata whole note at the end of the first line produces reasonable results, at least until you get to the middle of the page. I suggest you work backward with the other parts, stacking them above the bass line. Figuring these out might help in decoding the other vagaries of notation.

--Sixtus

[ZacPB189]

I looked a little bit at the soprano part and the clef is definetly a C-clef

[Lyle Neff]

My textbooks and class notes from the medieval and renaissance notation courses I took in graduate school are in some box out in the garage.

[sbeckmesser]

The contour of the bass part (V - I cadence at the end of the first line), the lack of imitative activity between the voices, as well as the "modern" clef and key signatures and accidentals point to this being written (or written down) in the Baroque or later. No Medieval or Renaissance score-decoding necessary here. The main problem is making sense of the note values.

--Sixtus

[Richard Mix]

The second half of the page is in triple time, using the white or void notation often found in Charpentier & Couperin. From long to short: stemless, stemmed, flagged. The colored or black notes are used for hemiolas or short-long pairs, but are the same values. Good luck! Who is the composer?