About the Barnett Music & Text Fonts

Barnett is a music font created by David Rakowski and licensed by the Really Loud Font Company from Intecsas oHG. The Really Loud Font Company has re-encoded Barnett for cross-platform compatability between FINALE for Mac and Windows, and made a few subtle enhancements to the Barnett Text font, but has otherwise remained faithful to Dr. Rakowski's original design.

The example at left is set in Barnett with Barnett Text used for the tuplets. Click on the example to ftp a PostScript rendering of the example to your local disk.

In his documentation for the Barnett font David states:

The intent of the Barnett font is simple: for Finale output that has the look of a particular syle of late nineteenth century American music engraving. The image source book is called The Eclectic Organ Teacher, an Analytical and Synthetical Method for students desirous of becoming familiar with the Cabinet or Reed Organ, and music associated therewith, by James G. Barnett, published in 1883 by the Oliver Ditson Company, Boston.

You'll notice quite a few quirky things about the look of this font: black noteheads are slightly narrower, and "white" noteheads quite a bit wider than customary. Also, half note and whole note noteheads are the same. Accents and tenutos are thicker, dots are much larger, and dynamics are smaller. The thick parts of time signature numbers are thicker, and the thin parts thinner. Accidentals are smaller, and the double sharp is very odd, as is the dal segno sign. The engraver frequently let accidentals run into leger lines, and allowed leger lines on consecutive notes to run together.

The C-clef used by this engraver is so perfunctory that I've added some optional C-clef signs to the font, on characters d, D and K. The C-clef on K was styled from an edition of the Saint-Saens Third Symphony, and the C-clefs on d and D done from memory from a 1912 musical dictionary I once had. It was red. Also, it looks like different engravers engraved various works in Barnett's book; one engraver used a quarter rest closer in appearance to the quarter rest we know. If you wish, you can substitute the upper-case R to use this quarter rest. Also, repeats are not notated with two dots, but with four, in all the spaces; if you wish, you can use the character under the lowercase L for those kinds of dots.

For more of a 19th century look, you can use Monotype Bulmer and Bulmer Italic for text and Adobe's Clarendon or Clarendon Light, or Monotype's Egyptian for titles.

To use the Barnett font, switch Finale's Default Music Font to Barnett and load the supplied Barnett Settings Library, supplied with the font. The Barnett Settings Library requires the Barnett Music and Barnett Text fonts and uses custom line thicknesses, offsets and stem connections to recreate the period appearance of Barnett's book.

Apart from notating tuplet numerals, the characters in the Barnett Text font are not intended to notate music, as they lack the correct proportions with respect to each other. Instead, they can be used to insert unpretentious-looking musical characters into a block of text in a word processor or a text block in other software. Additional features of the Barnett Text font include the ability to type strings of beamed eighth and sixteenth notes, trills with extendable tails and pages of old-looking manuscript paper, with or without clefs.