Jeff wrote:
| > From: John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| > In any case, most musicians don't consider them to be different.
|
| This one does. :-) Some folk musicians may not consider them to be
| different, but I'd argue that most classical musicians do.
Yeah; fiddlers generally distinguish them. Players of plucked strings
and keyboard generally don't. I play all three, so I'm completely at
odds with myself on the issue ...
| Actually, I can't think of an instrument that would be unable to
| distinguish between the two, though I can certainly think of some
| _musicians_ who can't. :-)
Well, that depends on what you mean by disgintuishing. I recall from
my early days as a piano student thinking that the definitions of a
"slur" were all totally nonsense. They invariably required that the
second note be played without an attack, and on a piano you quite
literally can't do that. It's not mechanically possible. (But there
has been an ongoing discussion among the mechanical types of the fact
that experienced piano players can in fact play a number of different
attacks, including some that are "theoretically impossible".)
| > The only "user friendly" approach is to allow ties between different
| > notes and slurs between identical notes. Anything else is merely
| > harrassing your users with silly intellectual hair splitting.
|
| I disagree about the "silly intellectual hair splitting", but I do agree
| that a program should allow both ties between different notes, and slurs
| between identical notes. The former is intended to cover the case of
| tying two different notes that have the same pitch, but if the user
| wants to use a tie for notes of different pitches, I see no reason to
| disallow it. The latter indicates notes that are more connected than
| legato, but should still sound like separate notes.
Well, golly; I was expecting to trigger a flame war. And here
everyone seems to be very nearly agreeing ...
My recommendation for a standard recommendation would be to say that
in ABC, these are all legal:
A- A
(A A)
A- B
(A B)
We should also attempt an education campaign to teach musicians what
the difference is between a tie and a slur. This will be a losing
battle, and a lot of ABC will always confuse the two, just as a lot
of printed music confuses them. But attempting to restrict usage to
some obscure rules isn't very useful; education is much better.
I also might add that, in my guise as a fiddler, I can very easily
make a distinction between (A B) and A- B. The former implies (to me)
more articulation on the B than does the latter. I wouldn't expect a
lot of musicians, even fiddlers, to understand this, and I'd be quite
tolerant of their confusion. If they asked, I'd try to explain what I
did differently. I also might add that I wouldn't necessarily make
this distinction based on what I see on the page, but more likely on
what I think the music calls for. (No self-respecting "folk" musician
should ever honor what's on the page. ;-)
An interesting case: Some years back, I graduated (;-) from piano to
accordion. One of the characteristics of a free reed is a very weak
attack. Accordions, concertinas and the like really want to play very
smoothly. They're just baby reed organs, really. They sound bad in
the hands of a novice because you have to learn how to get rhythm out
of them, while they want to turn everything into a church hymn. It's
sorta the inverse problem to a harpsichord (or mandolin or banjo).
Part of becoming a good accordion player is learning how to "fake" an
attack. The basic technique is to separate the notes by various small
amounts. Also, being precisely on the beat comes across as more of an
attack than being slightly off, so a "hornpipey" reel with 3:2 or 4:3
ratios will sound smoother than a precise 1:1 ratio.
On accordion, I also distinguish (A B) from A- B, and the strathspey
posted earlier from my collection is an example. In the trad Scottish
crowd, there is a special ornament used a lot that is like a tie, but
it's a straight line. It's used when the two notes are the same or
different. Fiddlers often play it as two notes under a single bow
stroke, with a slight relaxing of the pressure at the end end of the
first, giving a very weak attack on the second note. For two
identical notes, it sounds more like a "stumble" at the start of a
single note. I do this on accordion a lot, too. It's a different
ornament than the triple-note "shiver" that you hear a lot.
As people adapt ABC for different styles, we are going to see a lot
of this sort of peculiar usage that might strike others as unusual.
There are stylistic reasons for wanting to do such things. If we want
ABC to spread to other styles, we should probably ackowledge such
things, and document their usage rather than criticising them.
This doesn't make life easy for those trying to write ABC players.
One idea might be to officially encourage the use of the A: header
field to label specific styles. This could help if you want to make
sense of such style-specific notation. And, since people won't do
this, and because we want to play things in different styles, the
software should have options to override any such things and impose a
style. This is really how things like > and < should be handled.
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