| In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes | >The best comparison I've seen is: Suppose you were to find | >a piece of music written with two sharps (^f^c), and as you | >played it, you realized that every G had a sharp added, and | >it really was in A major. You'd probably be annoyed, right? | | Not particularly. Many editions of Bach have that, we classical | musicians are quite used to it.
Yeah; that's a variant on the earlier note about him using a dorian keysig for minor. In a couple of his works, I think that he really did do a count of accidentals, and picked a key signature that minimized them. This isn't surprising, since our modern concept of standard key signatures really hadn't stabilized then. | .. Horn parts in orchestral music never have any key | signature, the accidentals are all written in as they occur. Yeah; someone pointed that out recently. To me, this argues for an option telling the software to put the entire keysig into the music. An abc player has to do this in any case. It would be really handy if an abc formatting program like the abc2ps clones could also do this. I can think of several good uses for it. In an orchestral/band arrangement, it could be useful to retarget a part to horns by by changing the transpose= term and asking for no key signatures. Then you could use a single source file for several arrangements for different sets of instruments. | The notion of "tonic" is what I think you are referring to, and that is | something that comes out of the actual music as heard, not the notation. | However I concede it's a good thing to have in software which searches | the K: field for tonics. Staff notation does tell us that stating the tonic isn't an absolute necessity. But a lot of people seem to like to know it. And it can be nice information to have available when you're trying to put together a set of tunes. | So what point are you making about the abc standard? I got a bit lost in | that above :-) Basically just arguing for a very flexible and general way of writing key sigs. The K:<tonic><mode> approach is quite useful, and probably covers at least 2/3 of the world's music. But the proposed K:<tonic><mode><accidentals> scheme will handle most of the rest, especially if most of the possible omissions are allowed. (You obviously require the tonic if you have a mode, but the other subsets are all meaningful and useful.) One of the interesting aspects of this was pointed out by someone a while ago; it may have been Jack Campin. This is that, although a lot of musical styles use scales that don't fit our 12-note octave, this turns out to not matter too much. Most kinds of music have adopted European notation. This works because hardly anyone uses scales that have more than 7 notes in an octave. The few that appear to have more are like the classical minor, in that they have different ascending and descending forms. But each of these is at most 7 notes. So you can use the Western 7-note scale with accidentals. You just need to tell people how to tune the scale at the beginning. Most musical styles have standard names for such tunings. So you rarely actually need "microtone" notation; you just use a conventional scale name to map your scale to the 7 notes (plus accidentals) of the Western staff. In fact, this would be a good use of the mode= term that has been proposed. It would give a standard way to name such scales. Software aimed at these other musical styles could then display this name in the conventional manner. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
