Bryan Creer wrote: | Wil Macaulay said - | | > 2. they are in the 'standard' place | | Not sure what you mean.
Well, I do have a few tunes that are written with two sharps, but they are ^g^c. (Actually, I'd usually write them K:^G^c to make it obvious that it's not the classical signature. And I might also add =F into the signature, just to make sure that nobody can misread it.) | > 3. E Dorian means E is the tonic. | | Of course it does but does K:D mean D is the tonic or just that the writer | wanted two sharps? Well, it *means* that D is the tonic. People often say something other than what they mean. But the fact that someone misuses terminology doesn't necessarily mean that they're right. One of the cuter illustrations of this: There's an old test for telling whether someone is a scientist/engineer or one of those humanities types. You ask them "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" The answer, of course, is "Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one." (At which point the humanities types all get indignant. ;-) The reason that technical types tend to agree with this is that they usually appreciate that language isn't entirely arbitrary. Sure, it's artificial and invented. But its primary function is communication. If you misuse it and use your own meanings for terms, you lose the ability to communicate. This gets even more critical when computers get involved. They have maybe the intelligence of a fruit fly, and aren't very good at decoding misuses of language. In the case of abc notation, it's clear what K:D means. It means that the key is D major. Anything else is a misuse. Yes, you can do that, just as you can make up your own private language for any other topic. But you won't be communicating with others, humans or computers. You'll be misleading them. Now, this is understandable with people who don't quite understand the difference between, say, K:G and K:Em. We all understand that children and newbies can be excused for their misuse of a language. But the right response to this isn't to say that it doesn't matter. The right response is to try to educate them. We do want them to grow up able to communicate with the rest of us. | >Me, personally, just speaking for myself, I can play in (for example) G | Dorian | >without having to remember which flats are there, but I have to puzzle it | out | >if I see a tune written out with one flat and try to figure out which of the | possible | >tonics I should be thinking about. Yeah; I'm the same way. I tend to read new tunes slowly, in part because they don't make sense until I've got the key. Once I've figured that out, I can read much faster, because the music makes sense. This is the reason that I like to use non-classical key signatures. Thus, if a Macedonian tune is in hejaz scale, being told that it's Bb or Gm causes problems until I figure out that that's a lie and the tonic is actually D. Then it makes sense, and my fingers know where the notes of the scale are. A signagure of _B_e^F is useful, even without the tonic, because I know right off that it's not a classical scale, and I go right into "find the tonic" mode. It could also be C, and I know within a bar or two which it is. | So, presumably, you never use books of conventional music notation which | (apart from a few baroque pieces I've come across) never tell you the tonic. | Very few of them give the mode either, certainly none of the collections of | English traditional music that I have and not many of the Irish collections | (Krassen's edition of O'Neill for instance). Those that do give the mode | give it AS WELL AS not INSTEAD OF the key signature. I've often thought that the classical tradition of giving the kay (tonic and mode) in the title developed in part because that is valuable information to the musician. The notation doesn't provide any way to give the reader this information, so you give it in a different manner. | If you have trouble working out the tonic from the notes of the tune does | that mean we shouldn't rely on the accuracy of any tune you post? Of course, | a lot of people know less than you do about modes so their postings will be | even less reliable. That's already true. Bad K lines are a fact of life in the online abc collections. It's one of the main reasons for wanting abc to include explicit key signatures. True, this is less valuable than the tonic+mode. But it's better than an incorrect tonic+mode. Correct information is almost always better than incorrect information. | >I just have an objection to the statement or implication that that is | somehow | >wrong or misleading to the entire abc user community to allow tonic and | modes to be | >specified as a a first order definition. | | I wasn't aware that anybody had made such a statement. I don't think so, either. I think it's a common sort of confusion. Someone says "ABC should allow explicit key signatures". Someone else reads this as "ABC should stop allowing tonic+mode". But nobody has suggested that. I think that everyone in favor of explicit signatures agrees that Chris's K:<tonic><mode> syntax was a Good Thing. It just needs to be augmented with K:<signature> for the situations where K:<tonic><mode> doesn't work too well. And we should keep up the education campaign to get the key right when it is given. | >Skink allows Dmaj or Dion as synonyms for D, if you like. Good. It's abc 1.6 compliant. All abc software should treat these as synonyms. | You are assuming D means D major which in the case of K:D % E dorian it | clearly did not. Of course, one of the problems we'll always have is that a lot of people don't understand the difference. But this is (or at least should be) an education problem. What would be really useful in all the abc transcription projects would be if you could have a rule "If the key is obvious, put it in the K line; otherwise just give the signature". Then you could have the transcriptions done by people who can't get the key right, and (perhaps slowly) convert the signatures to keys during the proofreading or as people have time to play them. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
