Jack writes:
| > After several online discussions, I (and probably a few others) have
| > implemented the rather trivial extension of allowing any string of
| > digits, commas, hyphens and periods to label an ending. This means
| > that endings like [1,3 and [1-3 work with a very few abc tools.
...
|
| Does it behave correctly in this case?...
| ...
| K:D
| ...(a)...
| |: ...(b)... [1,3 [K:D Minor] ...(c)... :|
| [2 ...(d)... || % no key change
| ...(e)...
|
| The key signature is two sharps for the (a), (b) and (d) music and
| one flat for the (c) and (e) sections. (I can easily imagine a piece
| actually having this structure, and if there isn't one already out
| there maybe I'll just write one...)
Well, what I'd say is that it doesn't much matter, because this is
rather bad notation. If you were to stick it on stands in front of a
bunch of musicians, some would play (e) in D major and others would
play (d) in D minor. You can insult the musicians all you want, but
that wouldn't get them to do it right. (Of course, it's still a bit
odd to see abc notation on a music stand. ;-)
The right way is to put an "advisory" key change at the start of (e)
to make it clear to everyone (human and software) what the intended
key is. Otherwise, you are asking for a disaster when that point in
the music is reached.
"Standard music notation" is a bit of an oxymoron, and subtleties
like this are not understood in any consistent manner by musicians.
It may be true that a lot of musicians are not very well educated in
notational matters. But the only workable solution is to not leave
such ambiguities in your notation.
I'd also predict that, no matter what we might decide here, many of
the folks who write abc software would probably not much notice, and
would do whatever they damned well please. Or they'd not even
consider the problem, and what the code does would be an accident.
So, while it may be a Good Idea to say in the standard what happens
in such cases, it wouldn't help all that much.
What abc2ps does is just take things in order. The [K:Dminor] causes
a D minor signature to appear thereafter, until there's another K
field. This is probably more or less an accident, though Michael may
have thought of the topic. I wouldn't be surprised if some abc
players reverted to D major on the repeat and kept that key for (e).
I wouldn't criticise either programmer for this; I'd criticise the
person who typed the low-quality abc with the missing K field.
(I wonder if there are any players that would stay in D minor for the
start of the repeat? Isn't that what the music says? ;-)
But back to endings ...
One of the reasons that I've implemented the [1,3 type endings is
that the current abc "standard" leads to a specific musical disaster
that I've seen too many times. If only [1 and [2 are allowed, the
only way you can get the usual four-time pattern is by writing:
|: ... |[1 ... :|[2 ... :|
In this case, the final :| is a very subtle clue that you should then
repeat the entire section. But most musicians react to this by either
not noticing the final colon, or by deciding that it's gotta be a
typo, since the ending brackets very clearly say that there are only
a first and second ending.
This has turned up repeatedly in our "open band" Scandinavian dances.
Traditional Scand music typically repeats phrases four times, usually
with two different endings. Sitins who are reading the music (and
don't know the style well) will almost always ignore the :| and barge
ahead with the next part, while the experienced Scand musicians will
do the third repeat. The result is usually a total collapse of the
music. And often someone will observe that the music clearly shows
only two endings. This is very misleading, but what can ya do if the
software won't permit third and fourth endings?
But abc2ps is "open source", so I didn't have to live with a
showstopper like this; I could fix it. The fact is that most
musicians use the "1,3" and "2,4" in the ending brackets to determine
the repeat pattern, and pretty much ignore the colons. This is
totally conventional music notation, and almost all literate
musicians understand it. Including the ",3" and ",4" under the ending
brackets prevents the musical disaster.
There's no excuse for this not being in abc after all these years. If
we can't get it into the standard, the only sensible approach for
musicians like me is to just ignore the standard and do what we have
to do to get the music correct.
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