Jack Campin writes:
>>repeat signs are bars,
> I don't think so. At a quick glance, seven out of the first twelve
> tunes in the Northumbrian Piper's Tune Book have repeat symbols that
> don't coincide with bars.
Strange---I've been writing tunes like this for years, and had never
remarked that my repeats/part ends usually didn't coincide with the end of
bars. Of course, now you point it out, it's clear--the measure before the
repeat is completed by the pick-up notes of the next--or first, or whatever.
Duh...
>You're right about the unnecessary complication, but the convention in
>sources like Kerr's is absolutely clear. If ABC had a nested-repeat
>construction there would be an ambiguity, but that's years away.
>
Hmm...before even thinking about nested repeats, how about making
segnos and codas work? That's an easier way to handle them. (I have to admit
a great fund of ignorance here: are nested repeats common in serious music?
"Serious" not meaning classical, just that someone is seriously expected to
read it---the 64-tunes-per- page example sounds a bit frivolous in this
sense...) It's easy enough for computers, but nested repeats stretching
over a couple of lines of music sounds like a recipe for disaster for human
performance. Perhaps that's why the segno sign looks so little like the
repeat? By the way, there are also signs for one-measure and two-measure
repeats; they might make it pretty simple to write out those tunes which are
made up of repeated one and two-bar phrases. (Never tried it, tho.)
>
>You can do wonders of compression with nested repeats.
>
A Christmas challenge: find the shortest abc for the music to the
Twelve Days of Christmas. (all verses, & all extensions suggested in this
thread are welcome, of course.)
>I just looked that tune up in O'Neill's 1001 (it's #972). There is
>a notational convention there that I really *don't* think we oughta
>emulate... read a dotted crotchet as a minim??? For this one, he
>
Thanks for that!---I hadn't realized that it was also a set dance.
That *is* a nice little bit of syncopation there. It's also #299 in the
1850, but that's less interesting: the beats line up too well.
>You can do wonders of compression with nested repeats. There is a
>sheet in Murdoch Henderson's manuscripts titled "64 Great Scottish
>Reels in A Major", and he gets them all on one side, one line each,
>64 lines (the sheet is the size of a folded tabloid page). There's
>
Did he save some space by omitting the key signature at
the head of each tune? With that title, he could have.
John Chambers writes:
>BTW, if you want to see really insignificant repeat signs, look at
>the Ryan/Cole collection. [ ... ] Of course, this is one of many books that
>uses several repeat conventions. Not surprising in a large collection.
>
And perhaps a sign that it was a cut-and-paste job...?
Cheers,
John Walsh
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