--------
Gianni writes:
| >Frank Nordberg wrote (or did he?):
| >Forgeot Eric wrote (in reply to Gianni):
| >> I own one book from O'neill (1001 gems), and I don't think the abc
| >> transcriptions have lost anything from the original notation.
| >
| >Since I'm responsible for the ABC version of O'Neill 1001, I think I
| >have to answer this:
| >There is one rather important detail that might miss from the
| >transcriptions (depending on what ABC software you use): the mordents.
| >I used the letter M for mordents, believing that was a part of the ABC
| >standard. Gianni has pointed out to me offlist that it isn't. So some
| >applications will not display the mordents at all.
|
| ... What I did
| mention on the posting Eric was replaying were the abc
| transcriptions of the original O'Neill's' larger book, The Music of
| Ireland (1903), listing 1850 titles - including 625 songs/airs, 75
| O'Carolan's compositions, and 55 marches and miscellaneous tunes -,
| that has been made available through the collective effort of a
| number of transcribers.
You'll find several other minor "untranscribables" in O'Neill's 1850.
One of the strangest is the practice of putting a fermata over a bar
line. It's not really obvious what this was intended to mean.
Presumably it meant something different than a fermata over a note,
because he used that, too. Of course, a lot of ABC programs seem to
use H (hold) for the fermata, at least as its default meaning, and
there's no problem writing "H|]" or "H:|". The only problem is that a
lot of ABC programs will ignore it (and probably give a warning. So
there's no real problem with using it except that a number of
programs then need to be upgraded to recognize it.
I've been meaning to see if I could get my abc2ps clone to produce a
fermata over a bar line, but so far it hasn't reached the level of
top importance in my ToDo stack.
There are some other notational oddities in O'Neil's 1850. Can anyone
who has a copy list some of the oddities without looking? I've found
this an interesting trivia quiz. It turns out that most people can't
list even one. I'd conclude that those things aren't significant, and
other than the fun debates we can have over "correct" music notation,
they really aren't important at all. I've seen quite a lot of music
notation for which this seems true.
I have seen a number of people express shock when I point out some of
the things that O'Neill did. The shock is presumably because they
realize that they'd never even noticed.
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