Don Whitener writes: | | I have recently come by a small book "Songs of the Gael", by A. P. | Breathnach, 1922. This book appears to use precisely the notation system | described by Jack. I am about ready to transcribe the music to a familiar | (to me) form of notation. I have searched the Internet for some reference | on this system of notation, but have thus far had no luck in finding | *anything* that defines usage of the various characters and marks. The | letter characters obviously represent the solfege notes, but the meaning of | the other characters is not so clear. Can you, Jack, or anyone, point me | to a reference, either printed or online, that defines this notation | system? I would appreciate any help, as some published guideline would | sure help shorten the learning curve.
I looked into this a year or so ago. I found quite a lot of web sites that have music in solfa notation. I don't think I found any two that used exactly the same notation. It's pretty clear that the people using it are not developing software that uses it. It looks like they do a lot of editing of plain text, plus in some cases scanning images of music and laboriously aligning the images with the solfa and lyrics. The phrase "hopeless mess" comes to mind. OTOH, I suspect that if some programmer who is part of the solfa user community were to come up with some useful software, there's a good chance that it could be the start of standardization. The idea of a program that does both abc and solfa is probably good. If it were a java program that was easy to install, understood abc with both W: and w: lines, and could output a line of solfa under a line of music and above the w: lyrics, it could take the solfa world by storm. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
