Henrik Norbeck writes:
| John Chambers wrote:
| > Since I'm also involved with styles like trad Scandinavian music
| > ("How can you possibly write music without using 3rd and 4th
| > endings?")
|
| I don't really understand your problem. I've played A LOT of
| Scandinavian music and NEVER seen a 3rd and 4th ending in
| print. Though, of course they could be handy for handwritten music.
| What is needed much more is "bis" notation. Do we allow repeats
| within repeats, or should we use some other way of writing it?
Well, I suspect that you hang out with people who are less lazy than
the ones that I know. ;-) I've learned most of the Scand stuff that I
know either by ear or from handwritten pages. I've noticed that
published music tends to write out the repeats that the lazier types
condense. Consider this well-known tune:
X: 1
T: Polska efter Pekkos Olof Hansson
R: Bingsj\"o-polska
M: 3/4
L: 1/16
K: Dm
|: DEFG A4 d4 | A2BA G2AG F2AF | D2f2 ~f2ef gfed | ^c2a2 age^c A4 |
DEFG A4 d4 | A2BA G2AG F2AF | D2f2 ~f2ef gfed | age^c d8 :|
|: A2df a2ba g4 | A2^ce gage f4 | fafd ege^c d2e2 | ~f2ed ^c2ec A3A |
A2df a2ba g4 | A2^ce gage f4 | fafd ege^c d2e2 | {f}ed^ce d8 :|
This is what you would probably see in print. But note that in each
section, the first three bars are repeated exactly. So this can be
written as:
X: 1
T: Polska efter Pekkos Olof Hansson
R: Bingsj\"o-polska
M: 3/4
L: 1/16
K: Dm
|: DEFG A4 d4 | A2BA G2AG F2AF | D2f2 ~f2ef gfed |1,3 ^c2a2 age^c A4 :|2,4 age^c
d8 :|
|: A2df a2ba g4 | A2^ce gage f4 | fafd ege^c d2e2 |1,3 ~f2ed ^c2ec A3A :|2,4
{f}ed^ce d8 :|
This uses half as much paper, and actually makes the repeat pattern
much clearer. And you can fit twice as many tunes on a page, so you
don't have to carry as much paper to events where you'll need printed
music. (Or you can have twice as many tunes to choose from.)
But I think the real explanation is laziness. Or the desire to spend
less time writing and more time playing. So people writing down tunes
by hand are more likely to do this than a publisher.
One could argue that this notation would be useful in British-Isles
styles. There are lots of tunes whose 8-bar phrases obviously have a
4-bars-repeated structure. But on closer examination, it turns out
not to be that useful. In those tunes whose bars 5 and 6 are
identical to bars 1 and 2, you usually find that bars 7 and 8 are
both different from bars 3 and 4. So the above compact notation only
saves you two bars per phrase, and half of each phrase is under the
repeat bracket. This isn't nearly as usueful. In Scandinavian music,
the above pattern with only the last of 4 bars varied is so common
that treating it as 4x4 rather than 2x8 makes a lot more sense.
And, of course, if you're a classical musician, you complain when you
see any repeats. All those repeats should be unrolled, and everything
written out in full, no matter how many pages it takes. ;-)
One place that I saw the |1,3 ... :|2,4 ... notation a lot was back
in college when I was in the marching band. A very real constraint
here is that the musicians have those little "lyre" attachments on
their instruments that are mini-music stands; they use a standard
(quite small) page size, and you can't turn pages while you're
playing. An instrument's part MUST fit onto one page. For some
pieces, there's no real problem, but some music requires rather
inventive notation to shoehorn a piccolo, flute or clarinet part onto
a single small page.
I've actually had some email contact with a few musicians who are
involved in this sort of music. They find some of my abc2ps tweaks
very useful, for exactly this reason. Of course, for purely musical
purposes, none of this is needed. Repeats aren't needed. (Key
signatures aren't needed. ;-) But sometimes there are very practical
(if non-musical) reasons for wanting compact notation.
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