Eric Galluzzo writes:
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
| > ... The !...! notation might be better here, since
| > that seems to be what people like for official musical directives
| > such as !crescendo! and !da Capo! and so on. These are all special
| > cases. in this case, !23!z could be recognized as meaning "23 bars of
| > rest", and a length on the z would be unnecessary. Similarly, it's
| > common in standard staff notation to use a whole rest in such
| > measures regardless of the actual time signature.
|
| Hmmm. I don't know if I'd go for this. Firstly, we already have !0! through !5! for
| fingering symbols, so we wouldn't be able to do !4!z (for example); and secondly,
|this is
| a "real" notation that takes up time, not an annotation, which is what !...! notation
| seems to have been introduced for.
So where's the conflict? The use of !3! for fingering only makes
sense before a note, since there aren't any instruments (that I know
of) on which one "fingers" a rest. So !23!z means "23 of something
relevant to rests", and the only common use of numbers with rests is
for multi-bar rests. We would probably want the restriction that this
notation is only valid if the z is the only thing in the measure.
We should perhaps note that at least some programs right now will let
you use "17"z8 or "^17"z8 and will produce the right thing on paper.
The main reason you'd want to write this as !17!z is so that it will
be parsed as an officially-recognized abc construct, and not just
random text. But we don't *need* this; we can manage with quoted
text if nobody implements the !17!z notation.
I've also wondered if we could use a similar notation for the large %
that is commonly used to mean "repeat the previous chunk". This often
has a number that indicates how many measures to repeat. So !3!%
would produce a measure with a giant % superposed and a large 3
above, meaning to repeat the previous three measures. I'd bet that
lots of musicians would consider this notation "obvious", once the !!
syntax is widespread.
| Actually, there's already !f! and !pp! and such things in the draft standard, and
|James
| has implemented them in abc2midi. In fact, he's the one who originated them. :)
|These
| are not just random text; rather, they are well-defined (okay, somewhat-well-defined)
| musical instructions and hence go in !...! and not "...". I think the idea is that
|text
| in double quotes is just unparsed text, whereas text in exclamation points is an
| instruction to the ABC program.
Indeed. This might help standardize musical terminology even more. I
like to show people a couple of Bulgarian tune books in my
collection. They have tempo indications such as "kato rachenica"
("like a rachenica"). This is, of course, totally self-explanatory to
any Balkan musician. But I suspect it might not be so clear to many
other people on the planet, or to a Bulgarian musician 300 years from
now. A metronome marking just might be useful here.
(Now if I could just get a metronome that does Balkan rhythms. ;-)
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