Laurie writes: | The process is what is properly called "Anarchy" which means there are no | rulers. | | Actually there are rules, probably even some written ones, definitely some | unwritten, probably some written but wrong, but there are no rulers and no | police with any power. This has many consequences. I suggest we all just | learn to live with them because that's the way it appears to be. That's the | Internet.
Good summary. But I'd observe that this describes music notation in general. Part of our problem is that abc has obvious reasons to stay connected to traditional staff notation. But that notation has zillions of variants, at least one for every distinct musical style. In many of those styles, there are good reasons for the variants. The people who play a style tend to see their particular music notation as standard, and everyone else's as variant. Where the Internet really comes in is that it's a single world-wide communication system. With music notation on paper, it's easy to have a small clique that only exchange music with each other. Specialized notation doesn't matter much, because few people outside the clique will usually see it. With abc on the net, everything is easily available to anyone with a browser and a URL for a search site. The variations in music notation are highly visible. You can fetch a tune from someone, not know their crowd's favorite variations, and end up playing something very different from what was intended. It's pretty obvious that abc has inherited the musical cliqueishness. This is the source of much of the discussion of extensions. Chris's original abc was consciously designed for folk music of the British Isles. Nothing wrong with that, of course; it had to start somewhere. But that's a specialized musical style that needs some things and doesn't need others. Thus the question about 3rd and later endings. If you have books of British Isles folk tunes, you'll search for a long time before you find a 3rd ending. But just wander across the North Sea to Scandinavia, and you'll see 3rd and 4th endings in every 3rd or 4th tune. Similarly with the other extensions that have been discussed here. We will presumably continue to be as anarchical as any other motley collection of musicians. We have little choice but to live with it and adapt. The abc notation is just too useful, and it will be picked up by other musical styles. Those musicians will complain about abc's limitations. Some of them will be programmers, and they'll fix the problems. If we're nice to them, they'll share their fixes with us, and we'll have a more powerful notation. If we're not nice, they'll go off and fix their problems anyway, but won't talk to us. It's pretty obvious which is the better situation. One choice we obviously don't have is to restrict abc to just things that are needed in British Isles folk music. That horse has already left the barn and is happily gallopping across the steppes ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
