Bernard Hill writes: | | 1. No ability to change clef in non-voiced music, the clef change is | only in the voicing section. This means you can't write music for viola | or cello.
All the clef stuff has "traditionally" (;-) been allowed in both V: and K: lines. You really need this to handle the task at all well. | 1. Unusual key signatures such as "K:D =c". In a previous standard this | referred to a "global accidental" so that the key sig was D and every | subsequent c was naturalised. Fine. | | Following the example in in "K: Key" that "K:Dphr ^f" would give a *key | sig* of 2 flats and 1 sharp, this imples that the previously-quoted | example "K:D =c" would have me put a key sig of F#, C# and then Cnat. | Which if course is nonsense. Much more standard to implement as the | paragraph above. Well, "K:D =c" is indeed nonsense under that interpretation. I use this scale in some tunes, and I write it "K:Dmix=c" when I want the advisory natural in the key signature. But calling the 1.6 "global accidental" idea "standard" is a bit peculiar. This doesn't make much sense with staff notation, since when someone writes a D major signature and then cancels every ^c with a natural, you can't tell whether they were thinking of the naturals as part of the key signature. They probably weren't, because if they are consciously aware of mixolydian scales, they would have just written the key signature as ^f and not bothered with the silliness of cancelling the c sharps throughout. With staff notation, you can't tell what the writer thought the key might have been; you can only see the accidentals that they wrote on the page. G major, E minor, A lydian and D mixolydian look identical. A ^c in the keysig that's cancelled with a =c throughout just looks, well, stupid. What we'd really like with such notation is a three-way option, to put all the accidentals in the key signature, or to put the extras in the music, or to put the entire key signature into the music. All three would be very useful to someone, say, writing a music textbook. But I suppose this is really dreaming an impossible dream. | 2. |: at the beginning of a section is not ugly. And I do not like being | forced to accept incorrect notation in that if a |: is missing then the | repeat should be made from the previous double bar. Actually, I've seen music with nested repeats that work exactly like parentheses. I've even used this on occasion myself. Granted, most musicians have probably never seen this. But I've found that it doesn't even take explantion; musicians usually seem to understand it without even thinking about it. It does help if you use all the repeat symbols including those at the beginning otherwise people get confused)). ;-) While it is indeed common practice to omit begin-repeat symbols, this is not a nice thing to do to your readers. I've often found myself hunting for the beginning of a repeat, and thinking "Why couldn't the f***ing idiots who did this take the half-second extra to mark the beginning of the repeat with a fat bar and two dots?" In my experience, this produces more disasters during rehearsals (and sometimes during inadequately-rehearsed performances) than all other bad notation practices combined. If I had my druthers, I'd put a rule in saying that beginnings of repeated sections *must* be marked properly. But of course that's dreaming yet another impossible dream. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
