neueweise Notes

neueweise Notes contains noteheads common to New Music, as well as rests, and straight and angled flags.

Included with the font are a complete user manual, a font annotation file (FAN) and stem connection library for Finale, and a house style for Sibelius.

Designed to respond to the diverse needs of New Music notation, the neueweise font family enhances the look of any score. The Notes, Articulations and Pitches fonts can also add a modern touch of elegance to your Classical music score.

All neueweise fonts can be used in any notation software program that allows the user to choose and define their preferences for font use.

Design Characteristics

Although neueweise fonts were designed specifically for New Music, they work perfectly for traditional notation as well, adding a delicate touch of modern elegance to Classical scores. Some notable features of the font set:

• Distinguished graphic design consistency (thin/thick lines, notehead sizes);
• Standard accidentals, quarter tones and inflected (arrow up/down) versions of all;
• Extremely legible inflected accidentals, even at reduced size (cue notes, dense scores);
• Narrower design of many characters maximizes available horizontal “real estate”;
• Unified notehead width ensures consistent appearance and stem alignment of standard and alternate noteheads;
• Bold and stylish design makes your work stand out — musicians will love your score even more!

History

Around 2000, making symbols commonly needed for New Music notation available in one score usually required using several different fonts from different designers and sources. Each font had characters not found in other font sets, and this mix-and-matching resulted in many graphic design inconsistencies.

The first set of shirling & neueweise house fonts was developed in 2002, in part to overcome this problem, but also to design a font set that was elegant and stylish, and would be pleasing for musicians to look at during hours of practice and rehearsals. Wherever possible, the character width was reduced; horizontal space is a valuable thing in New Music Notation! Over the following decade, many design enhancements were made, new characters were added and the functionality of the fonts was greatly improved.

In January 2015, significant design and functionality improvements were made to the font set and the first three fonts in the neueweise family are now available publicly for the first time: Articulations, Notes and Pitches. Much attention has been put on ensuring graphic design consistency across the entire font set, but more importantly, in making them æsthetically pleasing.

Earlier versions of the fonts were used notably in mathias spahlinger’s éphémère and Lachenmann’s Pression, scores prepared by SN for PEERMusic and Breitkopf & Härtel, respectively.