Richard Robinson writes: | On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 04:48:04PM +0000, John Chambers wrote: | > | > On the other hand, when I first tried transcribing some Zwiefacher | > tunes, I also discovered that abc2ps accept M:23/44 and did the, uh, | > "Right Thing" with it, too. I was appalled! | > | > ;-) | | laughter. | | I suppose the bug will have to be fixed, now it's been mentioned ?
Not so far. We did have at least one discussion of the Right Way to handle such things. I think the general concensus was that the syntax should be: M:2/4,3/4 This would be drawn in the obvious way, with the time signatures next to each other (and a slight space between). Software that checks bar lengths should accept any of the listed lengths, and give a warning for others. If this were implemented in the major abc apps, I'd be quite happy to change my tunes to match it. But as far as I know, nobody has done it. For those who wonder what the hell we're talking about: The term "Zwiefacher" refers to a Bavarian folk dance that is a jumbled mixture of 3/4 (waltz) and 2/4 (pivot) steps. Each tune has its own pattern. The patterns range from trivial to insanely complex. There are several ways of notating the bar lengths in the music. Some music has a new meter every time it changes. But some musicians think this is cluttered, and just put multiple time sigs at the very beginning. Some don't bother with a time sig at all, but just write "Zwiefacher" at the top as a warning. Some of them correct the spelling to "Zweifacher". But I think native speakers of Bayrisch will sneer at this. In this subject area, any attempt at seriousness loses you points. To see some examples, look in: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/Intl/ Scroll down to the bottom, to the Zwie_*.abc files. One that our international dance crowd likes to hear in December is http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/Intl/Zwie_SilentNight.abc This isn't exactly the original form of this tune. It should be played in a loud, boisterous, German oom-pa-band style. You can clutter your abc with [M:3/4] and so on in every other bar (as I did in that tune). Or you can try to put the multiple meters at the beginning. Currently, M:23/44 or M:34/44 is the only thing that does this reliably. This works fine with abc2ps and clones. But you can probably imagine what some other abc programs think of it. Some software does implement M:none, for the no-time-sig approach. But that totally turns off all bar checking, so it's not really the right solution if you like software to do this checking for you. And this music isn't free meter at all. It has very strong, strict bars. They just aren't all the same length. Anyway, it's good for a bit of evil laughter now and then. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
