Jeff: should i just use this until the turn with the line through it
becomes
-------------
I wouldn't.  I'll try to be clearer.

A wavy line is not a turn. It is a mordent, mordente, inverted mordent,
Pralltrill, open shake, double or triple grace note, or Schneller,
depending on the time and whose book you read, but a more or less
vertical line through it inverts it, whatever it is. Between Bach and
Carcassi, 1750 to 1826, the thing was clearly somewhat chaotic.

There isn't any confusion *that I know of* about what a turn, or
gruppetto, is. Carcassi gives the backward S (like Z) lying on its side
(like N), for a turn, and an inverted turn is the backward S standing
upright (like Z). What's wrong with that? The engraver could use the
same buren and not have to go back and do a line through it. I don't
see the need for a turn with a line through it, and standing it upright
to invert it makes it easier to see which is which. The fact that one
might safely *assume* that a line inverts it is no reason to do it that
way. Haydn lived so long that you could fill a book with speculations
about what various signs meant at different times. You just have to
make some decisions. :-)

Carcassi is a great source for this stuff, because he was writing for a
mass market of ordinary people, and others were not. His was arguably
the most successful music book of all time, and these factors lend
considerable authority to his treatment of notation, IMHO.

(The Carl Fischer edition used a page of "Rudiments of Music" borrowed
from a clarinet method. The old Theodore Presser Carcassi edition had
more and better.)

When I was coming up I didn't have any respect for Carcassi, because I
compared him to Sor and Giuliani and sort of assumed that his music was
merely imitative. When I very belatedly came to see that he was
writing popular commercial music rather than classical or "good" music,
and started using his dynamics and tempos rather than interpreting his
music as if it were something else, I found that he has some really
nice stuff, and probably a smaller percentage of losers than those more
refined and better trained composers for guitar. For example, the
Andantino non piu Mesta (a little faster than walking tempo and not
too mournfully)(Op1, vIII, n.41) you can play at that tempo for almost
any audience anywhere and they will like it. A music critic will
not. Playing it faster or slower will not improve it. I haven't played
it for money yet but I will Saturday.

Again I thank all you programmers and notators for your herculean
efforts. I am really disturbed by the fact that lilypond can't yet do
adequately a piece as simple as the Milan pavan with three parts on one
staff, but I have found that being an obnoxious lurker has given me the
benefit of clarifying many notation issues, and thus made my own
handwriting much better. I hope for much more. Bless you. Don't give up.


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