Bruce Olson writes:
|
| Grace notes are automatically slured to the following note in my
| program, because you have to take the time for the graces notes from it,
| and if you don't slur them the main note sounds staccato.
Well, that's exactly why some people have objected to the automatic
slurring. Detached ornaments are normal in some kinds of music. I've
heard this effect from a lot of Scottish and Irish fiddlers. If the
software insists on adding the slur, then you can't accurately
represent the actual ornament. You're in effect saying that those
musicians are wrong, and they should play the notes slurred. This is
a peculiar thing for software to impose.
A lot of publishers also automatically add slurs to all ornaments.
The result is that musicians learn that such slurs are just noise and
are to be ignored. You play the ornaments so they sound right, and
ignore what's on the paper. But this is really a case of bad
notation. If the slur is meaningless, we're better off without it on
the page, so we can pencil it in if we like. Even better would be to
make it mean something, so the transcriber can use it to communicate
useful information.
| It's fairly easy to put grace notes after the note from which they get
| their time duration, but such are so rare that it didn't seem to me to
| be worth the effort.
It's certainly rare in ABC, since the software doesn't allow it.
Actually, I'd agree that it's rare in most of the music that I play.
But it does occur, and when I've needed it, I've had to resort to
writing something like A7/4B//c// rather than the more readable
A2{Bc}. And, of course, when I do this, people can include my file in
a list to show that post grace notes aren't used at all. Well, yeah;
if you don't let people use the little notes, they'll write things
out with big notes, and the result will be less readable.
It's fairly standard to write software that doesn't allow something
and then say "Well, our users don't do that, so it must not be
needed." I've heard this sort of reasoning repeatedly from all sorts
of software developers. I don't find it very convincing.
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