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David Barnert hath writ:
|
| Tonic/mode does not affect playback or printing, which are the two
| primary uses of abc (at least the way I and most of my friends use
| it). It is of importance only to people (or machines) trying to
| supply chords or create databases that include key information.
Several people have pointed out another situation where
K:<tonic><mode> causes problems: People transcribing staff notation
to ABC need to figure out what to put on the K: line. For a lot of
people, this is difficult and error-prone. So, even if you love
having the tonic and mode specified, you have to face the fact that a
lot of people (some of them very capable musicians) don't understand
the difference between K:F and K:Dm. Saying K:_B would at least have
the advantage of not being incorrect, though it has less useful
information than K:F or K:Dm.
| 1) To what does this refer: "one of the major advantages of abc
| over conventional notation"?
ABC does have a number of "advantages", i.e., things that it does
better than staff notation. It also has "disadvantages", things that
it doesn't do as well (or at all). The point here is that, if you can
get it right, K:F and K:Dm give some very useful information that
K:_B doesn't. And, since ABC is a computerized notation, we have an
ability that we don't have with printed music: We can ask the
computer to find things for us. Some of us file it very useful to ask
for, say, a match on "R: *reel" and "K: *F".
| 2) Is the answer to 1) so significant that it's worth severing the
| tie between printed notation and abc?
ABC isn't actually all that close to staff notation. There are a lot
of significant differences. ABC states the letter name of a note,
while staff notation used a physical position to indicate pitch. ABC
can represent a chord of simultaneous notes, each with a different
length, such as [d4A3F2D], something that staff notation is hardly
capable of. ABC can represent note lengths like G3/5, while staff
notation is restricted to powers of two. And on and on. ABC and staff
notation are actually radically different kinds of notation. It's
somewhat curious that they work together as well as they do.
The main point, I'd think, is that traditional staff notation is
rather important, and to a great extend ABC is and will be judged by
how well it can represent the same things. ABC users don't write
things like G3/5 because it can't be translated to staff notation;
the fact that ABC can say this is true but unimportant as long as
translation to staff notation is required by most users. (Note that
MIDI can also represent such lengths, but this is also immaterial as
long as staff notation can't.)
The K:Dm notation is yet another example where ABC can represent some
musical information that staff notation can't. This isn't a problem
when going from ABC to staff notation, because tonic+mode can be
translated to a key signature, and few people even notice that some
information was lost.
There are really two different criticisms of ABC that have led to
some people (myself included) wanting to extend the rules for K: to
allow accidentals. The first criticism is, as above, the fact that to
go from staff notation to ABC requires stating information that is
not in the printed music: The tonic and mode. That's easy for a lot
of us, but not for everyone, and it's a minor barrier to getting
correct transcriptions into ABC.
The other criticism is that staff notation can represent scales with
key signatures that ABC can't represent at all, namely scales that
don't match any of the seven classical modes. This is a barrier to
correct transcription of music that uses those scales. ABC has
attracted the attention of people (like me) who play such music. Yes,
you can just write out all the accidentals in the music. But it would
be better, both theoretically and aesthetically, if we could give the
correct key signature.
We had this battle with music publishers, and after decades, they are
finally going along with "funny" non-classical key signatures. The
first klezmer books a few decades ago had incorrect classical key
signatures and zillions of accidentals. Most of the new ones now have
the correct non-classical key signatures and few accidentals. It took
decades, but we've mostly won. We're not going to let up on the ABC
crowd, either. You're gonna get this one right, dammit, or we're just
going to keep beating on it until you do.
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