BR. JOEL: We mentioned in this week's episode that Fr. Harry Hagan developed a chant font to type chant notation, like you would type a Word document with Times New Roman, Arial and Helvetica.
BR. KOLBE: In this short story, he tells us a little bit about the font.
FR. HARRY: In the early '90s, in order to put the chant in books, we had to draw it on the page and it was time consuming. It was not easy to reproduce in a way, and it seemed to me that it would be helpful to develop a way to put the notation into a computer. We looked into several different possibilities and down at the Abbey Press somebody down there suggested that we make a font so that we could type the music into the text.
And so I developed this chant font and there was a program that gave you bunches of boxes and it gave you a box for A. And so you could put in the box for A, you could put an A, or you could put something else in the box for A. So in the box for A, I put four lines with a square note below the bottom line.
And then on S, the next letter over on the keyboard, I put four lines and then a square note on the bottom line. And then on D, I put four lines and a square note in the first bottom space, then all the way across.
Chant has a number of different shapes, and so when you shifted the keyboard, then you got a different shape. When you went to the up above, you got more shapes; and the number line were more shapes still. In order to get enough shapes, it meant that I had to have several different fonts that we used.
But with that we were able then to type in, in a sense, just typeset all of the shapes, the neumes of the Gregorian chant. And because it wasn't tied to a program, but it was a font that WordPerfect and Microsoft Word used, things that were done in the '90s are still readable today, so it's proved very versatile in that way.
It caused me to go back and to look very carefully at the fonts that were created in the 1930s at Solesmes in order to do the font. And certainly the people there who did those, they had a great sense of design and proportion and lots of subtle little curves in so the line looks straight. But really on paper, there's a subtle curve to it to make it look as it's supposed to look. So anyway, I studied that. That was kind of fun. It saved me from playing lots of card games on the computer. I spent it on creating this font.
BR. JOEL: The font is still used today. Fr. Harry recently transformed it from several different fonts to just one…
FR HARRY: …called Meinrad.