[ oh well, I'm still here after all; also and more surprisingly,
it looks like I'm back on Scots-L. Thanks, Toby. ]
> The fact that [mode notation] conveys info not in the tadpoles is
> true but unimportant. This is more a defect in standard staff notation.
But one that's very often fixed by supplementary text: the title page
of countless classical tonal pieces says if they're major or minor,
much art music composed in the modal system had a title that said which
church mode was in use, and when Middle Eastern musicians use Western-
style staff notation they say how you have to reinterpret the pitches
by giving the name of the makam.
> [...] If there were some simple, elegant way of defining arbitrary
> modes, I'd have argued for that.
What was wrong with the suggestion I made for extending ABC to handle
microtonality? Build in an assortment of basic units for relative and
absolute pitch - semitones, cents, commas, shrutis, ratios, hertz - and
allow the user to redefine note names in terms of them by an interval
or pitch sequence. Most users won't need to do this themselves; it only
takes one person to define what double harmonic, Bhairav or Big Ben's
bell pitches are. They just need to know how to find the definitions.
"Annoy Bryan" time. Pitch isn't the only place this comes up; in early
music and in the music of India and the Middle East, you also get the
notion of a metric mode. This goes beyond a time signature in that it
specifies the repeating pattern of time values, stresses and rests that underlies a
piece. The idea is implicit in much British and Irish
traditional music, where the duration of upbeats remains constant for
every phrase. An extreme example is this Appalachian song tune, with
an obsessively anapaestic modal rhythm throughout, which I've indicated
by spacing (double bar = text line end):
X:1
T:The Cruel Ship's Carpenter
S:Sharp & Karpeles, 80 English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians
M:C|
L:1/4
K:G Mix
D |G2 G F|D2F D|C2D F| G3 ||
G |G2 G F|D2F D|C2D F| G3 ||
G |G2_B c|d2c =B|d2c G|_B2||(B
A)|G2 G F|D2F D|C2D F| G3 |]
In many musical idioms this isn't some after-the-fact musicological
exercise: for Indian or Turkish music it tells the percussionist what
to do, the mode specifies which hand strikes at each beat.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
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