At 11:54 PM 2/23/05 -0600, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
>I don't think they are interchangeable texts at all, because they have
>different funnctions in the music. For one thing, text expressions have
>a specific impact upon way the music itself is to be realized, for
>example, how loud, or how fast. or by whom. A running header, or a
>dedication in a text block have nothing to do with the way the music
>sounds, and I would submit that the line,
>"Dedicated to my colleague, Dennis"
> is _not_ at all interchangeable with
>"Allegro ma non troppo".
>despite the fact that they are composed of different subsets of the same
>set of symbols.
>This is not, I submit, a case where previously interchangeable texts
>were separated by the software, any more than a the title page of the
>score of Stravinsky's "The Firebird" is interchangeable with a shopping
>list.
How does one cook & serve a firebird? Yum...
I guess I'm getting at the fact that the software authors had to make
decisions on how to move from pencil & paper to keyboard and screen. No
such decisions were needed with that pencil, nor with engraving tools. The
musical meaning is embedded 'behind' the symbol, not as part of it -- not
until it becomes contextual. "Allegro ma non troppo" has no use without its
context, and so why not let us set the context? The default context would
be the typical use, so in effect, nothing would seem to change.
The hierarchical way in which the software is set up (texts, lyrics,
musical symbols, expressions, articulations, other texts...) just gets
messy, as we experience every day. There are all sorts of lists and
arrangements of items that attempt to address musical functions. So we
start dividing what is attached to notes or measures or staves or systems
or pages or documents, with no intuitive way of understanding how to change
those actions. We just talked about how to move page-attached texts
elsehwhere. The struggle with the time signature swamp is always with us.
Trying to use articulations from other font sets, or combined
articulations, is a huge pain. Multi-line expressions are a problem to
create (unless that's been changed past 2K3). There's no easy way to make
any given object a stretchiness or smartness. Duplicating an articulation
as an expression or text item is impossible, so it has to be created again.
The possibility of floating anything anywhere (so often needed) is always a
problem ('oh, we've got to make that a real rest'). All that icky ossia
business.
We could follow the logic either way -- that we further subdivide how these
symbols work. A tempo indication is very different from a psychological
expression or a section marking ... but they're all expressions attached to
measures. At some point a decision is made to group one batch of things,
but not others. And, it seems to me, there's no longer a really good reason
for that kind of grouping if a simple way of entry and presentation is
offered ... one that is always visible, and is faster and clearer than the
mess of context menus, dialog boxes, and lists of expressions and
articulations and lyrics and texts that we have now.
To me, it makes more sense to render almost character-based as text, and
then assign its musical parameters as needed -- rather than having the
parameters inherent in the programmer's idea of how a group of characters
are supposed to work.
I think jef has made a well-wrought case. My only reason to jump in was to
suggest re-thinking the *entirety* of these entries and perhaps get a
unified and transparent palette out of it as a nice consequence.
Dennis
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