James Allwright wrote: > On Thu 22 Nov 2001 at 04:52PM +0000, Jack Campin wrote: > > No it isn't. A typical dance tune book will use "reel time" or "waltz > > tempo" the same way all through. In the Kurdish song book I quoted, > > the same Italian tempo terms are used over and over again and are NEVER > > defined at the beginning of a tune. There wouldn't be any point in > > tempo terms unless they had an understood meaning in a context wider > > than an individual tune. Today, everybody who has a metronome uses the > > commonest 8 or so Italian terms in the same way to about 1% precision > > because they're engraved on the scale, and I would guess the world > > contains a few million more metronome users than ABC users. > > As someone who doesn't own a metronome, this is new information to me. > If everyone who has a metronome posts these numbers, then maybe we > will find that they all agree and we will have the basis for a useful > standard. Likewise, perhaps you could post a list of military march > tempos. Where pre-existing standards exist, then providing support > for them in abc does seem like a good idea.
The problem is, that some classical musicans belive that these italian tempo definitions are clear und unique. Practically there are a few more musicans than metronome users and even within the core of classical music - Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven - there is clear evidence that it is not at all clear what tempo (in absolute metronome numbers - the only thing a computer playback program can make use of) is really meant with those classical italian tempo indicators (just listen to your classical music recordings!). So, there is more than one pre-existing standard for each textual tempo indicator, and therefore it would be counterproductive to fix them unchangeable within a program and even worse to disastrous to fix them within the standard. Simon Wascher - Vienna, Austria http://members.chello.at/simon.wascher/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
