[Nothing quoted here] Well, Bryan, if I'd quoted the whole damn thread it would have made the post kinda long!!
I left out Wil's comment because he was talking about the melody note and I'd already said that I have some sympathy with the notion that the melody note goes first. I still do. I don't have any good idea as to how I could implement that in Muse because Muse doesn't have a notion of "the melody note". If you *do* go for "melody note first" then you cannot also go for "first note determines length" because you may need a way of making the next thing happen before the melody note has finished. So that brings us back to "shortest prevails" or "explicit length". I left out Phil's because it seemed to me that Phil's main point was that this was in any case a pretty rare thing and not really worth spending that much time and energy on. He'll soon put me right if I'm misrepresenting him. You say "I would have thought that it was self evident that the [...] construct cannot cope with the same level of complexity as separate voices." Well it may be evident to itself, but not to me. I can see how separate voices can let you do things like have different timbres, volumes, attack etc. associated with them, and let the writer "explain the structure of the music", but beyond that I don't see it. I said >The printed piano music that I have seen seems to reply on "shortest >prevails" (it often also uses beams and other layout clues to connect up >notes into voices but when these fail it falls back on "shortest wins"). and you asked "Would you care to produce an example to demonstrate the point?" OK - here we go - sorry it's so long: I haven't got a scanner here, so I can't just add a .GIF or few. Sorry. Piano accompaniment of Messiah, "And the glory of the Lord" bar 19, right hand has tails down: C3 EDC and also z2 z2 A where the A has tail up. The two rests are printed right at the top of the staff, so the visual layout says "there are two voices here - one of them comes in after z4". The two voices are visually separated and you have to use the layout clues to make the bar add up. If you were to just read along horizontally you'd get [C3z2] [z2] [E] [z2D] [C] and that won't add up to less than seven whichever rule you use. If you just wanted the notes you could have C3 E[DA2]C. Flipping through the pages I see a note printed with both a tail up and a tail down. Now on a piano you can't do much about playing both tails, but they are saying "there are actually two different instruments in the orchestra that you are simulating and they converge here" (whether the pianist wanted to know that is another matter). I suppose they could thump it a bit harder. The piano part for "surely he hath borne our griefs" has so many notes in cross-rhythms that there doesn't seem to be any attempt to show what note came from where. The whole "voice" concept has gone, but there are tails up, tails down, notes with reversed heads and notes displaced slightly horizontally to fit them in. The "shortest wins" concept runs through it all. For instance just after the choir has finished bar 25 (one of the simpler bars) begins [A2C2z3/4] _d//d/>d/ of course the printed page doesn't distinguish between [A2C2z3/4] or [z3/4A2C2] or some other version. I just wrote it down from bottom to top for no particular reason. In this case the "melody note" is also the shortest and is the z3/4 rest. This is all an attempt to compress the orchestral score into one grand staff for a rehearsal pianist to play. It does all fit - the limit is not the notation but the number of fingers the pianist has. Bar 14 is a particularly simple bar and (ignoring a tie carried in from bar 13) they have written [G2d2e2] [=Ace][Gce] [A3/2c3/2e3/2] [Ace] (and there are some ties that carry on into the next bar too). but they wrote the top line (e2 e/e/ e3/2 e) as tails up and the lower lines tails down even though there was no need to do that on grounds of rhythm. Their policy was to give "voice" clues when there was a way to do it and when the going got tough to give the notes and the rhythm (relying on "shortest determines length") and let the readers figure out voices if they want. Guitar music is also full of examples of "shortest note determines next onset". All this is just saying what staff notation does. It doesn't mean ABC has to be the same. I just think it's a good idea not to be different unless we need to. "Shortest determines length" works because you can always add a rest to delay things, but we don't have negative rests to make things happen sooner. e.g. [G4B]zcd (melody is Bzcd) "Melody note first" pretty much demands "shortest determines length" (or else some new mechanism such as numbers after the close bracket) because the melody note may be longer than the accompaniment. "First note determines length" will also work because again you can always use a rest. e.g. [z3/4A2C2] _d//d/>d/ for the bar I quoted from The Messiah. Laurie To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
