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James Allwright wrote:
| On Sun 15 Oct 2000 at 11:49AM +0100, Phil Taylor wrote:
| > There is some scope for disagreement here. John Chambers wants
| > global accidentals to be octave-specific unlike normal accidentals,
| > so you can have both =C and ^c. That seems useful to me.
| This may be useful, but it also introduces ambiguity. Does K:^f mean
| sharpen the f in every octave or sharpen the f in just one octave ?
| I usually make the assumption that an accidental in the key signature
| applies to every octave, which rules out notation such as K:^f =F
Note that I've only implemented explicit key signatures in abc2ps,
which is merely a translator to displayed or printed music. It
doesn't need to decide such issues. It only needs to know where to
put the accidental on the staff. So the question is moot for abc2ps.
My version interprets K:^f and K:^F differently, because the note
merely tells it where to put the accidental. Interpreting this is up
to the human reader, and is of no concern to abc2ps.
I'd consider this useful, because there is a body of music that uses
octave-spcific accidentals: The music of part of the Middle East and
southern Asia. With printed music, this isn't a problem. If you are
playing that sort of music, you know how to interpret the notation.
But ABC is a world-wide, networked and computerized music notation.
There is a lot of software that converts it to sound. This software
can't reasonably be expected to look at a chunk of ABC, classify it
as to style, and infer what rule is used for accidentals. So it's
reasonable to consider that, for player programs, we need some way of
indicating whether accidentals apply to all octaves or just one.
Similarly, for multi-voice music, we need a way of indicating whether
accidentals apply to just the one voice or to all voices. Pure
notation programs like abc2ps don't need this, but players do.
The obvious suggestion is yet another %% directive. I wonder what
would be the simplest, most elegant notation for these two options?
BTW, I've used explicit key signatures mostly for Balkan and klezmer
music, which don't conventionally use octave-specific accidentals. A
common scale that the klez crowd calld "D freygish" could be written
in these two ways:
K:Dphr^f
K:Dphr^F
There is a problem with the first. The _e and ^f accidentals are next
to each other, and it doesn't look nice. The second looks better. You
also see this with the accidentals in the order ^f_B_e, but you can't
get this by adding to K:Dphr. You could write it other ways:
K:Dmix_B_e
K:D^f_B_e
Both of these obviously work. The first has the problem that the mode
isn't what a klezmer musician would expect. The second has the
problem that it omits the mode entirely. Neither of these is what I'd
call a serious problem. We're deep into an area of personal aesthetic
jusdgement here. But I'd say that K:Dphr^F is the most pleasing way
to do this particular scale in this musical style.
Not that I'd expect people (myself included) to be consistent.
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