Phil Taylor writes:
>I don't mind if you give any random collection of sharps and flats
>in the K: field as long as you also give the tonic.
It's clear that the twelve-tone crowd hasn't gotten into abc
yet...
>In order to describe a piece of music completely, you need to
>know any two of the tonic, mode and key signature. Knowing any two
>of these makes it quite trivial to determine the other if you need it.
>Conventional musical notation gives only the key signature, which is
>inadequate, and has led to the practice in classical music of including
>
One question strikes me: Phil, is the guitar your main instrument?
I was glad to get the post, tho, since I'd been wondering what the
controversy could be about. Now I see that it is more philosophical than
musical, It hinges on what "completely" means, what information is
sufficient, and whether or not abc should be content with minimal
sufficient information, or insist on more. Which in turn depends on what
one thinks is the purpose of abc. A subject I _really_ hope to avoid.
I claim that the key signature alone is sufficient to allow one to
decode the piece. (The proof is that even a computer---which is so dumb
that it only understands explanations which are so clear they can not
*possibly* be misunderstood---can correctly play the tune and display the
staff notation with only the keysig as a guide.) It's true that the
additional information of the tonic or mode is useful, and it's even
necessary for some additional things---such as telling the guitarist at a
session what key the tune is in---but it's not really necessary for the
musician who just wants to play what is written. Why should we demand
more?
Phil gave three examples where the additional info is needed:
automatic chord-setting, just intonation, and transposition. In the first
case, chord-setting, I'd think it's up to the user to get this right.
(Guitarists are free to disagree. In fact, I may be hard-hearted here,
since I usually strip the chords off any piece before playing it, so I can
hear what it sounds like. But I just tried chord setting on a couple of
tunes, and found to my surprise that abcmus set the same chords to the
major and the dorian key signatures. That's too few examples to allow any
conclusions, tho.) In the second case---and by the way, does Barfly do
just intonation now? Cool!--I'd think that anyone who knew enough to ask
for just intonation would also know what he or she was doing, so the whole
problem would be moot.
I haven't thought much about automatic transposition, but wouldn't
it work if the user knew what info to feed it? (Not necessarily including
the mode or key note.) If you write an E dorian tune with K:D and
trasnpose D to G, doesn't the tune transpose to A dorian? For the
explicit key signatures, the program probably has to do extra work, but
isn't it possible to transpose everything, including the key signature, up
or down by x semitones without knowing the key note?
At any rate, I'm in favor of minimality here: I'd like abc to
accept the minimal sufficient information to convey the tune, meaning in
this case that it would accept any of tonic and mode, OR explicit keysigs,
OR tonic-plus-modifying-accidentals, OR other such, within reason*. I
agree that tunic + mode is a great way to describe the music I play, and
in fact, I've learned quite a bit about it from abc, but I don't want to
force my own prejudices on others.
[* Of course, not everything is within reason. For instance, consider this
Question: what is K:DMixMix, the mixolydian scale based upon the D
mixolydian scale? ;-)]
>thought to what the actual tonic (or mode) is. The problem with this
>suggestion is that it represents a degradation of the abc standard, since
>the resulting K: field contains less information, and while programs
>would still be able to display the staff notation or play the notes
>
Loss of information, yes. Degredation? I'm not sure. One has to
have a little faith in the user. Presumably, he or she wants to
communicate some music to a certain audience via abc. If that audience
understands, it's a success.
>Furthermore, human nature being what it is, the introduction of this
>K: format would encourage many users to give up trying to figure out
>tonic+mode and simply take the easy way out by entering the key signature
>only. This in turn would inevitably lead to most new abc transcriptions
>adopting it, and the whole corpus of abc music would suffer.
But we already have this situation! Many people write the major
key which gives the correct sharps and flats, even for dorian and
mixolydian tunes. In fact, the O'Neill project even asked that its
transcribers do just that. (I think there were several considerations
here, tho.) As a practical matter, I doubt that explicit key signatures
would ever be used that much, except possibly for keysigs with one or at
most two accidentals---it's just too much bother to remember which
accidentals are needed, and to do all that typing; it's easier to write
K:D, or even K:EDor, than K:^f^g; and it's far easier to proofread. (Note
the typo.) So my suspicion is that it'll be used mainly by people who
have a reason to use it.
>Finally, if we want to make life easier for people transcribing
>from manuscript by permitting them to use an incomplete description
>of key, perhaps we should do the same thing for those transcribing
>by ear, and permit them to specify only the tonic. After all,
>any competent musician who was familiar with the tradition concerned
>should easily be able to figure out where to put the necessary
>accidentals in order to make sense of the tune. It's not a completely
>daft suggestion; it just shifts the reponsibility for working out
>the difficult bit of the K: field from the transcriber to the user,
>and is exactly analagous to the original suggestion.
>
Well, not *exactly* analogous. With the key sig alone, good sight
readers can play the tune correctly right out of the box, but with the
tonic alone and no keysig, they'd have to play a fair amount of it first
to figure out what are the "wrong" notes. And even then, it's possible to
make mistakes. For example, O'Neill printed the Cliffs of Moher in one
sharp---G major---and Krassen, in his edition, "corrected" that to one
sharp--A Dorian. Since O'Neill was careless with some of his modes, I
think Krassen felt there must have been an error there. But, while it's
usually played in A dorian today, the G major version is, in fact, played
too---Tommy Keane recorded it that way a couple of years ago, as learned
from his teacher, who learned from _his_ teacher...so that wasn't a
mistake in O'Neill, just a different version. (Actually, it's an unusual G
major tune---except for the keynote, it sounds mixolydian; and in fact it
sounds quite good if you change the key to K:Gmix. That gives three nice
tunes for the price of one (G, GMix, and ADor) all sounding different,
and all sounding traditional.)
Cheers,
John Walsh
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