According to Gerou and Lusk in their Essential Dictionary of Music Notation, "Because of the ease in reading of beams, the use of flags in vocal music - in relation to the lyric - has become obsolete". So I guess it's at least contentious. (Out of 161 pages they devote 12 whole pages to beams).
I suppose I should add that I can merge two voices into a staff in Muse too, but I don't think it's normally a clever thing to do. You finish up with invisible rests and all sorts. Laurie ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jack Campin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2002 3:42 PM Subject: Re: [abcusers] Question about rhythm notation > The attitude that I take in Muse is that Muse does beaming automatically, > so I disregard the beaming information in the ABC. I can argue both > sides of this, but the argument for this action is that fundamentally > ABC is about describing the music, not the printed page. Beaming is in the standard, though, and for vocal scores it does convey musical information; you beam notes that go on the same syllable, not otherwise. > it seems to me that trying to express beaming in ABC in all but the > simplest cases is impossible. > For instance consider even [GB]A and I want the G and A to be beamed > but the B to be a separate flag. Or if you think you can solve that > one (perhaps [B G]A) then how about [BG] [AF] and I want the B to be > beamed with the A, tails up and the G with the F, tails down. You can do those in BarFly by putting the notes with different stem directions into different voices and telling the program to merge them. Usually it works, but you can end up with some rather odd "voices" that way. And since there's no way to change the number in mid-tune, if you need five voices at any point of the tune they have to be there from beginning to end; this looks weird with some early music where chords are used only sporadically in a basically monophonic texture. I think you could represent any piano score in BarFly using 176 voices; two voices for each key, one for each stem direction. Like an ASCII player piano roll. You'd need an Apple Cinema Display to edit it. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
