Phil Taylor wrote:
(of the & operator)
>
> My take on it is that the & operator sets the time point
> of the music back to the previous bar line, and the notes
> which follow it form a temporary voice in parallel with
> the preceding one. I suspect that this should only be used
> to add one complete bar's worth of music for each &.
>
With this limitation, it seems reasonable. It's in abc2mtex,
without that limitation, for writing multiple-staff music. I used it
exactly once, on something quite simple, and the abc quickly became
unreadable, and, worse, nearly un-editable. But...it *did* do what I
wanted.
> It seems like a good idea to me provided that we don't get
> carried away. In MusicXML there is a similar construct,
> with the addition that you can switch staves as you set the
> time point back, and the Dolet plugins for Finale and
> Sibelius use this extensively for e.g. Piano music. Every
> bar contains all of the parts, right and left hand, bass
> and treble clef. It's an absolute nightmare!
>
This pretty well matches my experience. I concluded that if I
were to use this any more, I'd need a pre-processor of some sort... So if
we want to preserve human-readability and use the & in any complicated
way, it might be worthwhile discussing alternatives.
Cheers,
John Walsh
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