On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 6:29 PM Owen Lamb <[email protected]> wrote: > Aha! Apparently all the old issue conversations have been migrated to GitLab. The links and attachments work fine here: https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/1060
Brilliant! I had clean missed how that's worked out. > This book being the only source cited for such differences, I don't think there's any reason at the moment to propose the two variants be distinguished within SMuFL itself. Bar objections, I'll go ahead and call Emmentaler's mirrored versions stylistic alternates and leave it at that. > > I'm also going to hold off on asking for distinction between half and whole noteheads, because, as far as I can tell, there isn't enough of one. It appears that Walker always defaults to down-stem notes unless lack of space necessitates up-stems, so that would explain why whole notes are only found in their down-stem variants. There's no situation where using the up-"stem" variant of a stemless note would free up space or avoid a collision, so down-stem is simply used all the time! > > Of course, this raises the question of what to do with our current whole-half distinction. I motion to scrap it, and have \walkerHeads and \walkerHeadsMinor default to downwards stems and noteheads to achieve the same effect. It'll be more accurate to Walker's originals, to boot. Any objections here? There are at least two shape-note communities. The four-shapes (Sacred Harp, Fasola) <https://fasola.org/> and the seven-shapes (Aiken.) Here's my perspective from the seven-shapes world, with no experience in the four-shapes one. I think the majority of seven-shapes people today are in church communities descended from the singing school traditions of early America, especially the south. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_school> These include the Mennonites (Joseph Funk's people) and the Church of Christ groups. I don't know exactly what size this community is, but based on group populations, I'm going to guess over a million people. Some of these have had people singing from seven-shape hymnals every Sunday for the past century or more. I think shape notes are important to these people, but not their defining feature or their main reason to exist. For their music printing purposes, unless someone's trying to reprint a landmark work, exact historic authenticity is probably not a huge concern provided things are recognizable. New songs and new books are continually being published in this scene. Personally, LilyPond's Aiken Thins are the only shapes I need for what I do. I've sung from seven-shapes books all my life, and it's telling that only from the LilyPond community did I learn the distinctions being discussed here. The four-shape communities seem more defined by particular books (Sacred Harp, etc) and conventions or singing events based on them. Their Wikipedia article indicates that deviations from the historic tradition can be divisive issues. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Harp> I gather these folks would be more likely to care which bars of a MI diamond note head are darker than the others. They also have the advantage of organizational structures to contact with questions on their musical matters, whereas for seven-shapes I'd have no idea who's word would carry. -- Karlin High Missouri, USA
