Jack Campin writes: | > There's nowhere in the tune body where you can place a single | > field and have it apply to all voices. | | There is nowhere in any ABC spec that explicitly allows that yet, | but it is common for medleys to be made up of tunes by different | composers or from different sources, so the informational fields | should be permitted within a tune body as applying to all voices. | (Having different voices by different composers is possible, as | in some mediaeval music, but much less common).
Hmmm ... I have a fair number of examples of this in my music binders. It's especially common in my trad Scandinavian collection. This style has a lot of harmonies, but there seems to be an idea that harmony lines are supposed to be improvised. Writing down the tune is desirable; you want tunes to be fairly stable so that people can play a tune together. But writing down a harmony line seems to be something that is mostly for the benefit of newcomers to the music, to help them learn how to do harmonies. Anyway, it's not unusual to see pages with a melody line and a harmony line, each with someone's name attached. We don't seem to have a way for abc to express this cleanly. (I've also seen a few with multiple harmony lines, each with a different "composer" name. One problem this can cause is that newbies often think it's music for N voices. So they play all the harmonies together, and wonder why it sounds so bizarre. ;-) I'd think that the most obvious way would be for a C: line inside a part to apply to only that part. We already have a distinction between P: lines in the header and P: lines in the music; this would just add the same distinction to C: (and maybe O:) lines. This wouldn't really qualify as an extension of the abc syntax; it's more of a semantic point. We could make a similar point with lyrics, since it's not at all unusual for different verses to come from different sources. In general, abc's scoping rules are a bit vague. But then, this is also true for staff notation. -- O <:#/> John Chambers + <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> / \ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
