bert wrote: | John Walsh wrote: | > Second question: I have a Chinese book of flute tunes, written out | > much like abc, but in numbers, not letters. If I could read the Chinese | > introduction, I probably wouldn't have to ask but...does anybody here know | > anything about this notation? Is it particular to the flute, or is it a | > general music notation? | | I once bought a simple plastic flute during a trip to China once. It | looks like a recorder but has six holes, just like an Irish whistle (the | same fingering, too). The accompanying note that demonstrates the | fingering uses a similar (maybe the same?) notation. I don't know | whether it is a commonly used notation or one reserved for the flute. | What I could make up from the pictures (unfortunately, I don't read | Chinese) is that '1' probably denotes the root of the scale (an F in the | case of my flute). Notes from the higher octave have a dot above the | number, those from the lower octave a dot below.
This is similar to a whistle tablature that you see in some tutorials. There are several variants, but the most common uses one or two numbers. The first number is the number of the top open hole (0-6). For split fingerings, the second number is the count of holes closed below the top open hole. This turns out to be sufficient for whistles, since more complex split fingerings are not really needed. For recorder, you'd need a more complex system, since there are useful split fingerings that are more complex. Sometimes a '+' is used to indicate the upper octave. Thus, on a D whistle, the =c note would be "6 3" or "6 4", depending on your instrument. The top hole (6) is open, and the next 3 or 4 holes are closed. Players quickly learn that you can always make a note slightly flatter by closing some holes further down the tube, so you can casually ignore this well-known fact in the tablature. I've also seen an "inverted" form of this notation, counting closed holes from the top. Thus on a D whistle, ^c would be 0 (no holes closed), and D would be 6 (all holes closed). I'd suppose that people who don't understand zero would add one to the first number, or they would use some special symbol for "no holes open/closed". There are counting systems still in use that don't have a true zero symbol, but there's always a negative term available. In any case, I've also seen a numeric Chinese notation. It's based on counting notes from the tonic, of course. I've seen examples of Chinese and Japanese songs many centuries old, in which the words were marked with numbers that gave the melody. It's a lot like solfa, really. I don't know much more about it, though, or how standardized it was/is. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
