| > John Chambers wrote - | > >Nobody has suggested replacing K:tonic+mode with K:signature. | > | > Unfortunately Bruce Olson did say - | > >That's one more reason why I'd like | > >to see the key-mode in K: eliminated; we can cut out ambiguity in | > >notation and put in into interpretation where it belongs | > | > so my prediction that nobody would ever say anything of the sort was wrong. | > While I agree with almost all the bits I understand of what he says I dissent | > from this. Clearly the tonic/mode format cannot be eliminated now that it | > has passed into use which is the point I was making when I first raised the | > subject.
Yup; looks like we were both wrong; someone did suggest it. Of course, then Bruce remarked: | Sorry I stated that sloppily. I most certainly don't want to abandon all | (or even any) existing ABCs. So I guess we don't have to jump all over Bruce for this suggestion. Anyway, the suggestions really have been to continue to treat the original K:<tonic><mode> syntax as abc's Best Practice, when it works, but to also permit an explicit list of accidentals in addition to or instead of the mode. The tonic should also be made optional, though strongly encouraged when it can be determined with reasonable accuracy. The hope is that people would just continue to use the current notation, but we could allow people to give just the key signature when they aren't sure what the actual key is. The worry, of course, is that a lot of musicians would be too lazy to figure out the key and would use just a signature when they know the key. Whether you see this as a good or bad thing depends on whether you would be more bothered by an incorrect key (as happens a lot now) or by just the signature when the key is obvious. Then, of course, there are the folks like me who play music that's in modes other than the classical "Greek" modes. There is a lot of music in the world that uses other sorts of scales. There has been a long battle with publishers to get them to accept the idea of key signatures that aren't like what they learned in their grade-school music classes. That battle has, to a great extent, been won, and we are seeing printed music with all sorts of "funny" key signatures as the World Music scene goes mainstream. It is a bit disappointing to see that we have to fight this same battle in the abc arena. The Internet user community is supposed to be world-wide already, isn't it? Whatever are we doing with a music notation that only works for a tiny percentage of the world's music? I mean; that's fine for Chris's "proof of concept" preliminary implementation. But wouldn't we expect something a bit more general when (if ;-) we ever get around to doing a real standard? Of course, we could preserve the tonic+mode scheme if we could come up with a standard that includes all mode names in use anywhere in the world. That might be doable, with a bit of field research, but I'd hate to see the size of the resulting translation table. (Now I'll duck as this degenerates into another discussion of how to best notate microtones in abc. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
