Music is a very broad church. There are many ways of looking at it of which
the modal system is only one. Just as valid as the rest, but not the only
path to truth. I have never come across anybody who was "openly contemptuous
of intellectuals [?!] who think such things [keys and modes] are important"
but I have, through this list, come across people who are openly contemptuous
of those they describe as "musically literate". I have spoken to a wide
variety of people about this, from those who play by ear and can't read a
note (and are brilliant), classically trained players and people with a deep
academic interest in folk music. I have received answers from "Do what?" to
"The mode's in the tune. You don't need a label on the front."
I think John Chambers was being a bit harsh on the person who put K:G. In
conventional notation minor keys are represented by a key signature of the
relative major with accidentals where necessary. If they were using software
that didn't allow a choice of minor keys (such as Muse), this is the only way
they could do it to print out the dots as they wanted. I've just had a look
at one of the K:Em versions and it does the same.
I have never said that K:EDor is a bad idea. (No I haven't! If anyone wants
to argue with that, back it up with evidence.) What I do think is that
having it as the ONLY way of specifying a key is a bad idea. I have yet to
see a coherent reason why a sharps and flats only K: command was regarded as
such an outrage (even after John Chambers had proposed one). It might not
include all the information you would like, but at least (barring errors) it
wouldn't include any misinformation.
>Even a brief glance at a lot of the ABC on the net makes it abundantly clear
>that many people don't give a damn about making it readable.
This is where I came in. The main thrust of my original posting was that the
abc database was a bit of a mess that needed cleaning up and that this should
take priority over some of the more esoteric "nice to have" developments that
seemed to be being discussed. A lot of developers seem to have made their
programmes rather fault tolerant thus encouraging sloppy notation. The modes
issue was a bit of an aside.
As a first effort towards tidier abc, my syntax/standards checking programme,
ABCcheck, is now available for download from
http://members.aol.com/abacusmusic/. This is still a provisional version, so
all feedback is welcome. Priority will be given to comments that are polite,
short and constructive.
As an afterthought, what K: command would you put on this polka, which is a
favourite in sessions round our way?
X:1
T:Scan Testers No 2
C:Scan Tester
M:4/4
L:1/8
K:G
|:Bc|d2dd d2d2|d2^c2=c2B2|A3B A2G2|
F6DE|F2EF G2FG|A2d4cB|A2G2F2E2|
D6:|
|:Bc|d2G2B2AB|c2E2A3B|c2e2d2c2|
B4B3c|d2G2B2AB|c2E2A3B|c2ec B2A2|
G6:|
Bryan Creer
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