Stefan Haller wrote
>Reasonable or not, what MusiXTeX generates is clearly wrong in some
>very common cases. For example a soprano clef with one flat (you
>need this all the time when typesetting pre-baroque music).
Well, I tried it (via vanilla PMX), and by gosh the flat does show up
below the staff! Interesting to know.
And historically, it's not even limited to pre-baroque. Just last
weekend I played a quartet by Louis Antoine Dornel (1685-1765) for
three unspecified treble instruments and continuo. Two lines were in
treble clef, one soprano, and continuo was bass with occasional alto.
However, for me personally this is not an issue. The reason gets into
some typesetting philosophy. When I first started typesetting music,
I also took the "purist" approach, trying to use same clefs and other
notational conventions as in original manuscripts, to the extent
permitted by the typesetting program. Even then, it occurred to me
that there was a certain inconsistency: the very act of typesetting a
piece changes its appearance from the original. One particular event
pushed me over to the "modern-conventions" camp: A very accomplished
baroque violinist told me that she found my use of the archaic
accidental convention very confusing, simply due to the incongruity of
the use of this convention in a modern-looking, neatly typeset score.
This is a personal choice of mine; others of course may do as they
wish. And none of this in any way excuses MusiXTeX for putting a flat
below the staff as part of a key signature.
--Don Simons
